...to force itself as a pinned application at setup:
http://blog.mozilla.com/rstrong/2011/02/09/firefox-auto-pinned-to-the-win7-task-bar/What appears to be a planned- or possibly even already implemented - feature for Firefox 4: Automatically "pinning" themselves to the taskbar upon installation.
This in and of itself doesn't seem to notable, except that there is no programmatic way for any application to add itself as a Pinned application- the idea is that the user controls what is and is not pinned. This means that Firefox 4 is using an entirely undocumented method of pinning themselves. Probably something like
this.
The "defense" is that Internet Explorer is pinned by default; that seems rather flimsy, since in the EU where there is that "browser ballot", if the user doesn't select IE, it isn't pinned... in fact even if they <DO> select IE it isn't pinned, it basically acts as a shortcut to start the browser ballot and is removed regardless of the selection. Everywhere else the "BUT MS DUZ IT!" excuse it flimsy at best, since IE is only added as the default upon first installation. If it's removed- it stays removed. They don't add themselves to quick launch when you update IE (as Firefox will do when it updates) or when you install Word or Excel or any number of their applications; it's a default. Saying that it's "unfair" is pretty stupid. What is "unfair" is that that if they go through with this it will be Microsoft making sure their "feature" is still working in later windows versions, by adding even more appCompat shims to make sure Firefox can still perform the undesired behaviour using the undocumented method it does now, because if somebody updates to, say, Windows 8, and their copy of Firefox 4 suddenly crashes at startup, they aren't going to blame Firefox or Mozilla, they will think it's the new version of windows causing the problem- after all, that's all they had changed.
It's interesting because no microsoft application, and certainly no other browser, automatically "pins" itself, and I doubt very many of them explored the possibility. And yet they still feel that they have the "disadvantage", one could claim they do, since IE is installed by default with most versions of Windows. But thing is, without the browser, they couldn't get another browser (excepting of course WGET and CURL, but for some reason I don't think everybody understands how to use those, and they aren't on a standard windows install either; and suggesting that everybody understands the concepts required to download another browser with ftp (not to mention that they would have the URL memorized) is pretty silly.
Even sillier is the constant suggestion that Microsoft give people a choice. They already have a bloody choice. If you want to use another browser, you switch to another browser. They don't try to impede you in any way, In my case only a few applications launch IE when they need to use a browser, and those are all decidedly non-Microsoft applications; additionally, last time I checked Windows was a Microsoft product, it's pretty stupid to force them to actually have other, competing pieces of software on their disk. It basically means that Microsoft becomes a Pro Bono distributor for those other applications, and somehow that is construed as "fair".
Anyway, the fact that any of the developers (of the setup application or otherwise) are delving into the territory of the undocumented concerns me. Are there other undocumented hacks that firefox uses? Do they know that this will break catastrophically on other language versions? I hope this "feature" doesn't make it to the released version. Using undocumented functions and structures leads one down a slippery slope of version compatibility issues, and for all they know it could be changed with the upcoming SP1 release for Windows 7. (No doubt they will claim malice on the part of MS for changing the wholly undocumented APIs).
It also makes me wonder if they use any other undocumented APIs.
