 | By Susan Bradley Two Microsoft add-ons for the Mozilla Firefox browser — .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation — were temporarily blocked this week by Firefox staff because of vulnerabilities announced by the Redmond company on Oct. 13. Firefox experts may allow the use of both add-ons by the time you read this, but for safety’s sake, users of all browsers should apply the Microsoft patch immediately. |
MS09-054 (974455)
Firefox users need to apply so-called IE 8 patch
Many Firefox users were greeted with a rude surprise when they opened their browsers on Oct. 16 or later. A dialog box advised Web surfers to disable two Microsoft add-ons that some Firefox users didn’t even know they had: .NET Framework Assistant 1.1 and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
The Mozilla Foundation had placed the Framework Assistant and WPF on its list of blocked Firefox extensions, saying the add-ons posed a risk of remote code execution.
In a blog post on Oct. 16, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of engineering, explained that the two add-ons had been blocked because these extensions posed a threat and many users had difficulty removing the extensions manually.
An updated post by Shaver on Oct. 19 explained that the Assistant was not vulnerable, causing the block to be lifted. WPF is vulnerable, he wrote, but Mozilla will unblock it as soon as Microsoft’s fix has been widely installed.
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