MS Issued a Fix For Its Unwanted FireFox Extension

As we discussed last February, and again a few days ago after the Washington Post noticed, Microsoft installed without permission a hard-to-remove Firefox extension along with a service pack for .NET Framework 3.5. Reader Pigskin-Referee lets us know that, as it turns out, Microsoft issued a fix a month ago; details here.

Comments

Re:So the WaPo reports a story a month obsolete?

[Beelzebud]

Is it too much to ask that if you have issues with MS that you bring up the legitimate issues and leave the BS alone?

Re:So the WaPo reports a story a month obsolete?

[billcopc]

It's bad because the entire philosophy behind Firefox addons is freedom of choice. How hard would it have been for Microsoft to prompt the user whether they want this thing or not ?

In simpler words: My computer, my decision.

Wiping Microsoft wipes the extension

[Anonymous Coward]

This Anonymous Coward will be removing this extension by wiping Microsoft of his machine and installing Linux. After 25 years of developing commercial applications for Microsoft platforms, I'm done.

Re:So the WaPo reports a story a month obsolete?

[shutdown -p now]

On a side note, why does Sun's JDK installer bugs me to also install OpenOffice (checked by default), and every single Google desktop application has a "set Google to default search engine", and often also "install Google toolbar for IE", also checked by default?

It's just the established software culture these days. From that perspective, installing a browser plugin which you won't ever see (until you navigate to a website that uses it) is relatively benign - compared to installing a 200Mb Office suite.

Re:So the WaPo reports a story a month obsolete?

[AmiMoJo]

The license agreement didn't mention anything about installing a Firefox plugin. I never agreed to having it installed.

It isn't like people have that much of a choice about security updates anyway. You can either accept their terms or be vulnerable to exploits. Switching to Linux isn't an acceptable option, MS has a moral and possibly legal duty to fix security problems in the software they provide and I pay for and those updates should not interfere with my other software.