Mozilla Blocks Microsoft's Buggy Firefox Plugin
Found on PC World on Saturday, 17 October 2009
Mozilla developers have blocked a Firefox plugin that was quietly pushed out by Microsoft, saying that it presents a security risk.
"Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plugin for all users via our blocklisting mechanism," wrote Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver in a blog posting.
It's suprising that everybody seems all happy about this. Mozilla flips the kill swkitch, security wins and Microsoft gets the blame. Now let's imagine a little change: Microsoft decides that Firefox has a serious bug and disabled it on Patch Tuesday. Within seconds, the online community would be up in arms and rally up to mutilate everybody in Redmond, while others start a class action lawsuit.