What is the plugin? The handy hand for any software.

#computerscience #beginners #todayilearned #todayisearched

What is Plugin?
A plugin is a software that adds specific feature or functionality to existing software.

In most cases, plugins are used to adds some functionality to existing software to make it more powerful and useful.

Plug-in, add-in, add-on, or extension are the different name of plugins.

For example, your chrome is browser, it’s work is to help you in browsing the internet. And chrome does it very well.

But there are too many ads disturbing you while you browsing the internet. So, in that case, you will go to the chrome web store and download ad-blocker. And your job is done. Now you can enjoy ad-free browsing.

In the above example, you want a specific feature and that is some software that can block ads in websites. And here ad-blocker is one kind of plugin that helps you in achieve that results. And chrome is an existing software on which the plugin (ad-blocker) is installed.

Here ad-blocker just adds some functionality to chrome.

Applications support plugins for two main reasons:

Adds new functionality on the platform — Plugins make it easy for third-party developers to add new features on the platform.
Reduce software size — Plugins helps in reducing the software size. You can create software with limited functionality and can provide a wide range of plugins via the store. So when a user needs it they can download it. Just like Chrome, Mozilla is doing the same.

Different scenarios of plugin usage

Media players use plugins to support different file formats.
Email clients use plugins for encryption and decryption.
Graphic software uses plugins to support different file formats and advanced image processing.
Text editors and IDEs uses plugins to support programming languages and some mostly used functionality.
Audio editors use plugins to process and analyze sound.
web browsers use plugins to adds new features and functionality.

So these are some common scenarios where plugins are useful. Feel free to know me if I miss something.

Till then Keep Coding, Keep Loving. Catch you up in the next article.