Firefox is Evil

Mankind has long been aware of the evil of Microsoft and all its works.   That is why I dumped my PC and bought a Mac, and switched to Firefox from Internet Explorer.

Only…

For the past several weeks, Firefox has been popping up a window, urging download of its own new version.  The options are:  Ravish me now;  Ravish me later.   There is no option for “Go away and die.”

Repeatedly, I clicked “Ask me later”, and hoped that it would eventually tire.  But as the Devil well knows, we tire before he does.  So at last I clicked, Do me.

One immediately saw the benefits of fiber-optic:  The caption said “Downloading… estimated time left 2 hours and 40 minutes” -- but no sooner had it posted that, than it switched to “estimated time left 7 minutes” and then immediately to “seven seconds”, and then, abandoning all pretense at precision,  “several seconds”.  And several seconds later, it was done.

Only…

A  message popped up, grim and terse in the style of traffic tickets or dunnings from the IRS:  “Firefox has detected an incompatibility with Google Desktop search 1.1.”

Now… Google Desktop search is the one program with which I am entirely satisfied.  For years, Microsoft operating systems got lamer and lamer at finding your files; how this Mac might do it, I have no idea; but Google just works.   So I was gratified to read the penitent subsequent message:

We are mortified that so basic an incompatibility should have escaped beta-testing.  All the engineers involved have been fired, and the executives executed.  Reverting to original version …

Only, no;  that’s not what it said.  It said:

Google Desktop has been disabled.

There was no appeal -- no “Undo” -- no “Torture the Firefox executives instead”.

Firefox is evil.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

(Hey guys, gotta pay the bills...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TWpcZGE_q4

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Footnote:

It lied.  It may have tried to disable mighty Google desktop (whose wrath will be terrible), but the thing still works.   We have, thus, “a tyranny tempered only by its incompetence”, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase.

En revanche:  It silently swiped the default browser page I’d set up, replacing it with a less useful changeling. 

A friend told me how to fix this… but in this changing world, specific instructions may apply only to specifically configured machines.  I was obliged to reply:

Thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately, on this computer, there is no such option under "Edit".
Under "Firefox", I did find something that said "Use current pages"  --sic, plural, which makes no sense.  And running "Help" on "use current page" brought up something about color and HTML. 
But when I clicked it, being on the main Google/Mozilla page, or even when I specifically pasted in the URL,
it threw that away and substituted... one of my mailboxes, of all things.

Never mind, I eventually found out how.  It’s quite easy once you know how to do it -- but then, a safe is easy to open, once you know the combination.

Firefox is evil.

~

[Update 23 Nov 2011]

Once again an alarming pop-up invaded my screen, warning me that, unless I immediately downloaded many more megabytes of unknown content from Firefox, their defective product might allow very bad things to happen to my computer.

So naturally I complied.  And this time was pleased to see that a preliminary window noticed the presence of Google Desktop, and inquired whether I desired to retain this.   Much reassured, I replied that I would indeed, thank you very much.

Churn churn churn, download bytes upon bits hopefully not malware… Done.

And yet, after all that -- once again a message that Firefox refuses to play in the same sandbox as Google Desktop  and that the latter has accordingly been disabled !

Fortunately they lied.  Or perhaps they tried:  but the Great God Google (terrible is His name) eats firefoxes like fireflies, for breakfast.