Slashdot reported Sunday that, during a routine round of Windows updates, some computers received a Firefox plugin from Microsoft, without their knowledge or consent.

For the uninitiated, Firefox is a freely available, open source web browser. It has become a very popular browser as Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been losing market share according to a couple of companies who keep track of these types of statistics. They determine these statistics using, among other metrics, your user agent.

A user agent is a small line of text that is sent to a website when you visit it. In fact, the user agent your browser sent this server is:

CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)

It can identify to the server your operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux), your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox), and other details about your computer.

So back to the plugin. It's assumed purpose, because Microsoft was not forthcoming about the installation, is to add "ClickOnce" support to the browser, as well as modifying Firefox's user agent to report what version of .NET was installed on the machine.

ClickOnce seems to be a method of deploying and installing software and is primarily for developers, although it has been rumored that this plugin was distributed to machines that did not have Microsoft's development environment, Visual Studio, installed.

While the secret installation seems innocuous, but it has created quite a stir in the tech community. Many in the community do not trust Microsoft, and to install something such as this with no notification to a product they did not create or support, is inexcusable.

I tend to agree.