Nerds butthurt over old .NET 3.5 SP1 Firefox extension

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

June 1, 2009 2:24 PM ET in News, , , , ,

FOSS faithful are having a six month-delayed hissy after realizing that February’s Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 surreptitiously installed a Firefox addon that cannot easily be removed.

Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 SP1 included a Firefox addon which makes it easier for developers to create one-click web applications that run on the .NET engine. Rather than installing the addon on a per-user basis, which gives users the option to uninstall the addon as normal, the globally-installed addon would fore a user to go spelunking in the registry to remove it. A subsequent May update from Microsoft rectified this acrimonious install procedure by switching the addon to a per-user model, just like every other addon.

From February launch to May patch, this entire process went unnoticed until sites like Slashdot and the Washington Post started running the story over the weekend. Cue mass hysteria, calls of monopoly, the usual rabbles from the “IE sux!” crowd and we arrive here on Monday to ask the question: If Microsoft installs a bunk addon and nobody notices, is it really a problem?

Mmmhmm.

6 Comments:

  1. MiracleManS
    1 Jun '09, 7:10 pm

    I'll be honest, I couldn't care less.

  2. Cyclonite
    1 Jun '09, 7:27 pm
    Quoting MiracleManS

    I'll be honest, I couldn't care less.
  3. Kwitko
    1 Jun '09, 8:04 pm

    I only noticed it because I had to uninstall another extension.

  4. neoanderthal
    1 Jun '09, 9:04 pm

    It's amazing(ly stupid) how people get upset about this, but don't seem to care when Google chooses to install an auto-updater for Chrome without permission, or Sun puts in an auto-updater for Java, again without asking, or Adobe does the same thing for Acrobat... the list goes on and on.
    I'm more annoyed by Mozilla's presumption to inform me of my "rights", while setting Firefox to automatically check and install updates for their browser than I am about MS sticking a .NET plugin in Firefox.

  5. lmorchard
    2 Jun '09, 3:32 am

    I'm not really sure why this is coming up again all of a sudden. We got an earful about it at Mozilla about 6 months ago for allowing it to even be possible. People at MSFT got poked, there was a My Bad, and it seemed to go away.

  6. Thrax
    2 Jun '09, 3:34 am

    Slow news! And the Washington Post is techno-stupid.

    This is what happens when you leave journalists in charge of IT.

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