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Windows Advantage Validation Process On Firefox
GraemeDonaldson writes "According to this IE Blog entry, Microsoft seems to be serious about supporting non-IE browsers. Mention is made of a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox. The Windows Genuine Advantage validation process now works in Firefox too. From the article: 'Basically, customers said "We want to make sure our PCs are running genuine Windows and have access to all the content on the Microsoft Download Center; the experience when we're running a Mozilla browser is not great. Do something about it." Brad's team did. I think that's a good thing for customers.'"
The slow link response seems to be because IE is generally memory-resident (and smaller) and takes less time to open than Firefox in general (certainly I notice no difference in times between opening a link from Outlook and opening from XChat or whatever), so I'm not convinced this is really an issue of their bias.
The updates use controls that wouldn't go on Firefox because they'd be deemed unsafe (I believe there's a plugin to make them work, I wouldn't recommend it though). The best way for Microsoft to get around this would be to stop relying on a browser at all for Windows Updates, which is basically what they've done by "forcing" Automatic Updates (which isn't browser-based) on in XP SP2.
Perhaps the monopolist is starting to get the point.
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
Steps 1 and 2 are now in place. In this case it's Mozilla/Firefox that gets embraced and extended, but what gets extinguished is open-source media formats.
By making a Mozilla plugin for their media product they reduce the pressure on content providers to supply content in other formats.
Meanwhile, any bets on whether / when use of the plugin starts "accidentally" introducing vulnerabilities into Mozilla that are exploitable during ordinary browsing? (Something like the backdoor {BARNdoor} you install in IE when you APPLY to obtain the full removal tool for Sony's rootkit?) And there goes security, the main driver of migration from IE to Mozilla.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You know, alot of the comments here show that the "groupthink tools" mentality has really sunk in here. For Christ sakes, they are changing something that people bitch about here, only for people to COMPLETELY SIDE STEP WHAT THE DISCUSSION IS ABOUT and bitch about other things unrelated to it, just to fluff their epeen on anything anti-MS. I am glad to see that some people are actually saying something positive, ie that Microsoft is actually...um, you know...playing fair and recognizing they have competition. Thank you for helping support insightful discussions (which my post certainly is not! :))