When Firefox first came out, it had only one major competitor – Internet Explorer. And soon it became popular not only because of its security features but also partly due to its capability to adopt new features through thousands of add-ons. These add-ons are continuously being contributed by Firefox users all over the world. There is hardly anything, extensions for which are not available in Mozilla add-ons repository. But sometimes companies and rogue authors slip in their own adware code inside these Firefox add-ons, especially if you do not download them from the Mozilla website but from a third party site. If you want to know whether you have installed any harmful add-on containing spyware, adware or even malware, then you can use the Extension Defender add-on for Firefox.
You can get the Extension Defender for Firefox from the Mozilla add-ons repository. The extension does not require you to restart the Firefox web browser. As soon as the Extension Defender is installed, it become available for your use. It adds a new icon in the Firefox toolbar, clicking on which you can open the Extension Defender interface.
Here you have to click on the Scan button to start the scanning of any malicious extensions and add-ons installed in your Firefox web browser. The scanning is pretty quick and displays you a list of malicious add-ons found in your Firefox browser along with options to remove them.
If it does not find any malicious add-ons, then it simply displays the message that no malicious extensions have been detected and gives you option to rescan for add-ons again. At the present time, it does not have any options.
Conclusion: The Extension Defender is a very useful tool to protect and notify you of any malicious add-ons installed in your Firefox web browser. It can scan and notify you of any extensions with adware, spyware or malware in them and allows you to remove them easily.
You can download Extension Defender from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/extension-defender/.