Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension

[hronmeer]

Obviously, this only affects Windows machines, but there are people here who either have to use Windows at work, or use a VM, so I'm sharing the news. It looks like Microsoft is sneaking this Firefox extension onto people's computers without letting them know about it, and they disabled the uninstall feature. You have to edit the Windows registry in order to disable it.


Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension
Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 01, @10:45PM
from the hitch-hiker dept.
Microsoft Mozilla Windows
An anonymous reader writes "While doing a weekly scrub of my Windows systems, which includes checking for driver updates and running virus scans, I found Firefox notifying me of a new add-on. It's labelled 'Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant,' and it 'Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed .NET versions to the web server.' The add-on could not be uninstalled in the usual way. A little Net searching turned up a number of sites offering advice on getting rid of the unrequested add-on." The unasked-for extension has been hitchhiking along with updates to Visual Studio, and perhaps other products that depend on .NET, since August. It appears to have gone wider recently, coming in with updates to XP SP3.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/01/2143218


And here's the info to kill it:

Microsoft force-installs Firefox extension
Published on Monday, January 26th, 2009

I haven’t worked with Visual Studio and .NET for a while, but in my current project that’s the platform. I downloaded a necessary update, and as it turned out, Microsoft hit a new low…

Background

The update I installed was Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, and naturally it was needed as an update to Visual Studio.

In that page there’s a long list of the software that will be installed, which are all Visual Studio components.
What happened

What came as a complete surprise to me is that it also installed an extension in Firefox, mentioned nowhere in the documentation and not as an optional install in the installer. Ok, bad and annoying enough, but things were about to get worse…

Trying to uninstall it from the Add-ons menu (Tools > Add-ons in Firefox), the Uninstall button is disabled! Yes, my dear developers, Microsoft has actually and intentionally made it impossible to uninstall it!

Such behavior and thinking goes completely opposite to the nature of the web, and it’s definitely not the stance of any other Firefox extension - or any software whatsoever, actually! No developer in his or her right mind would do this to an end user, so I’m sure it’s some “clever” middle management guy who thought this up…
How to remove it

Against what many people think, though, it can be uninstalled - but by nothing less than hacking the actual registry of Windows! Open your Start Menu and choose Run. Type in regedit and press enter/click OK. Within there, you have to look for something called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions and delete the key there (for Windows Vista 64-bit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions).

When you have done that, type in about:config in the address bar in Firefox, accept the warning and then remove general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet and microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch.

And, to finish it off, open Windows Explorer and go to \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\ to remove the last remnants of the evil extension.

http://www.robertnyman.com/2009/01/26/microsoft-force-installs-firefox-extension/


Bad Microsoft, BAD!

[LinuxNative]

I can't believe Microsoft would do something like that! They are such an upstanding company.

[hronmeer]

Well, of course, in general Microsoft is a great addition to the global community. And let's not forget, they always managed to get the trains to run on time.

No, wait, that wasn't Microsoft, that was.......