Plugins enfranchise minority browsers
Neat story at a Mozilla contributor's weblog... online banking in Taiwan used bank-distributed encryption coding modules, which were previously only available as an ActiveX Control. They recently repackaged these modules in the classic cross-browser extension mechanism, Netscape Plugins.
Result? Now more people have choice in browsers, because third-party functionality could be included in each minority brand.
Opening up to standard cross-browser extensibility results in a much better situation than if plugins never were.