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Microsoft's Unwelcome Firefox Support

After winning the Great Browser War back in the 1990s, Microsoft tried hard to pretend that there wasn't any other browser than Internet Explorer. Even today, many Microsoft sites still don't work properly unless you use IE. Yet the market share for other browsers, particularly Firefox, has been hard for even Microsoft to ignore. It's gotten to the point where Microsoft not only has to acknowledge that there are other browsers, but even support them.

Microsoft gladly supports other browsers when it suits their business goals. In some cases, Firefox support is nearly trumpeted from the mountaintops, such as with Silverlight. Many potential Silverlight developers wouldn't even consider using it unless it supported Firefox, which is now the choice of about one-quarter of all Internet users. Third-party developers can't afford a hole that big in their platform support, and Microsoft wants developers to know they have it covered.

When it comes to Microsoft's support for Firefox for their ClickOnce technology, Microsoft took a very different approach. In February of this year, Microsoft released the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. This release had a rather stealthy Firefox plugin component to make ClickOnce support much more straightforward. However, it was very unwelcome in some quarters.

ClickOnce support has been available in Firefox for more than two years; the plugin is available on the official Firefox plugin site. However, that requires a Firefox user (or their IT support group) deploy the plugin so that ClickOnce will work seamlessly. Developers who've bought into ClickOnce would prefer to let Microsoft do the heavy lifting for them, and that's what the plugin is all about.

The problem is, ClickOnce isn't all that common outside corporate circles. Most consumers and small businesses just don't need this Firefox plugin. Having been trained to see any unusual or unannounced software as suspicous, they were angry that Microsoft seemed to sneak this software onto their system and graft it into a non-Microsoft software product. To compound the insult, Microsoft made the plugin so that it couldn't be removed by most users--the Uninstall button for the plugin is grayed out!

After a few non-complimentary articles revealed the situation, Microsoft finally did release a patch that makes it possible for users to remove the ClickOnce support, and also the Firefox support for Windows Presentation Foundation. I can only hope that Microsoft learned their lesson from this episode. It's great to support other browsers, but you should ask permission first.

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