Oct 5, 2010 14:34 GMT  ·  By

The highly anticipated feature of automatically disabling outdated plug-ins has been introduced in the latest Google Chrome Canary Build along with WebKit's cross-site scripting filter.

Back in June, Google improved Chrome plug-in security by introducing an integrated Flash Player version, a sandboxed PDF reader, and announced plans to start disabling outdated plug-ins automatically.

"Medium-term, Google Chrome will start refusing to run certain out-of-date plug-ins (and help the user update)," the company said at the time.

It looks like developers moved pretty fast and an initial implementation of the technology was added to the Google Chrome Labs page in the latest Canary Build.

Labs is a new location in the Chrome interface from where advanced features can be turned on without needing to use the traditional command-line flags.

The Labs page is available in Chrome 7 and can be accessed by typing about:labs in the address bar (Omnibox).

The Canary builds are Chrome releases considered even more experimental than Dev channel ones and are pushed out every few days.

The about:labs page on the latest 7.0.542.0 Canary offers the possibility to enable the new "Disable outdated plug-ins" option.

A description of the feature reads: "Automatically disables plug-ins with known security vulnerabilities and offers update links for them."

It's worth noting that Firefox also warns users of oudated plug-ins after a successful update and offers links to download their latest version, however, it doesn't disable them.

The XSS Auditor from Apple's WebKit engine has been integrated as well and can now be enabled from the same page.

The feature offers protection against cross-site scripting attacks, but it might not be compatible with all websites.

Giving Chrome's fast-paced development cycle, we estimate that both features will make it to the stable build in a couple of months.

The latest Google Chrome Canary Build can be downloaded from here.

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Disable outdated plug-ins introduced in Chrome Canary Build
about:labs page in Chrome Canary Build 7.0.542.0
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