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Nerds butthurt over old .NET 3.5 SP1 Firefox extension
Robert Hallock
June 1, 2009 2:24 PM ET in Tech
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.
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