Microsoft Oversteps Common Sense Boundaries - Again

Microsoft went a very long way in making Vista prompt the user before allowing all sorts of activity to take place. In fact, they went so far that during beta phase development a lot of testers found the prompts to be extremely annoying.

But, Microsoft basically said all that was to better protect against potentially harmful activity.

So now I have to ask, why oh why would Microsoft forcefully install a .NET extension in Firefox without first asking for the user's permission?

If you installed the .NET Framework updates earlier this year and had Firefox on your systems then that's exactly what took place, and you probably didn't even realize it.

To make matters worse, the company apparently disabled the usual Uninstall button in the Firefox add-on manager. So to remove there bulk from Firefox you have to either edit the registry or install yet another update from Microsoft that enables the Uninstall button.

I find this all to be extremely troubling and far beyond disturbing. Granted, you can remove it. But that still leaves the problem that Microsoft overstepped boundaries by not prompting the user before installing their add-on into a third-party software package they have no business meddling with. And this act runs entirely counter to the way they handled the Vista "user experience" development.