After installing Microsoft Office, I was surprised to see how many plug-ins, add-ons and other helpful utilities get installed into the operating system as well as web browsers. Many of these features are used only by a handful of consumers and still everyone else has to go along and have these installed in their systems. Recently we talked about how you can disable the Office Upload Center program in Windows. Similar to this program, Microsoft Office also manages to install web browser plug-ins in all the web browsers found on your Windows PC which not only impacts the performance of the web browsers, but also that of the entire system.
You can easily check whether the Office plug-in is installed in your web browsers or not by visiting their plug-ins management section. In Firefox web browser, you can do this by entering about:plugins in the address bar. In the Chrome and Opera web browsers, you can achieve the same by entering chrome://plugins and browser://plugins respectively.
In the Firefox browser, you can remove this plug-in by simply renaming the plugin file. You have to note down the plugin file (in our case it is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office 16\NPSPWRAP.DLL) and rename this file to something else like NPSPWRAP.DLL.OLD. This will instantly remove the Office plug-in from Firefox browser.
In the Chrome and Opera browsers, you can click on the Disable button under the Office plug-in on the browser plug-ins page. This is much easier as you do not have to rename or delete any files.
As far as the latest web browser offering from Microsoft – the Edge web browser is concerned, it does not support any plug-ins and hence you do not have to worry about any third party plug-ins getting installed in it. Perhaps in the future, when and if Microsoft decides to add extensions and plug-ins feature available for Edge, then we will have to find a way for removing the Office plug-in from Edge.