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Dear Microsoft: Don't meddle with Firefox

David Heath
Thursday, 04 June 2009 19:39

Opinion and Analysis

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Microsoft's automated update facility is a wonderful thing.  It applies patches to all kinds of Microsoft packages.  Oddly, it recently also tried to pwn Firefox.
David Heath
Firefox Microsoft

Earlier this year Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 was pushed out to all relevant PCs.  All well-and-good.  Except that a hidden portion of the update added the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant Firefox extension.  

Without notification, without permission.

The .NET extensions allow (amongst other more 'reasonable' things) for websites to install any software of their choosing on your PC.  Hang on; didn't we all switch to Firefox to avoid such behaviour? 

Better still, Uncle Bill made sure that we couldn't (easily) uninstall this small gift.

Reports from a number of sources all suggest that it is very difficult to remove the update.  Going to the Add-ons section of Firefox reveals a greyed out Uninstall button.

Three months after the roll-out of this 'enhancement,' Microsoft released an update to the 'enhancement,' which enabled the Uninstall button to function as expected.

Gosh, thanks for your concern.

Oops, the reason the uninstall button was unavailable was that the update was a "machine-level" package; independent of the logged-in user.  The patch permitted per-user removal.  No - this was NOT the same as uninstalling the package.  

Not even close.


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