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Comment by AndreSegers | Hacker News Reader

I admire Firefox for what it's accomplished, but Chrome has stolen my heart. I had to use Firefox today actually to test something, and discovered a Bing bar that I'm pretty sure I didn't consent to, taking up valuable real-estate.

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Whatever that bar is, it's not Mozilla official. Some other software on your computer put it there.

That very well may be, but my point was basically that it's not something I have to worry about in Chrome either.

You will, once the toolbar/adware/malware makers start targeting Chrome more. (Google can try to stop them, but it will be an arms race.)

It doesn't have bars really, only buttons that open floating views. Although I suppose you could inject a bar into the web page.

Some other software on your computer put it there.

Why does Firefox allow this?

It's not a question of Firefox allowing this -- if you run any program on your computer it'll have access to your data (and hence to your Firefox profile), and one of the principles behind Firefox is extensibility.

Chrome has taken the same approach Firefox did:

We can't prevent this from happening so we try to provide a good way for other software to do it, so they don't do it in terrible ways:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/external_extensions...

It's an addon

There is work to give the user more control over this that unfortunately didn't make it into Firefox 4 [1], but ultimately it's a battle that can't be won; on the desktop, apps can modify other apps. I suspect that this will happen to Chrome too.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596343

Heck, since Chrome has to put itself into the users AppData folder in order to do silent updates, is there anything preventing malware from just screwing with the Chrome libraries themselves?

Technically, your operating system's security model allows this. There's little Firefox could do to prevent it.

This is a historical accident; only toy and mobile OSes have any sort of application-level access control.

>> There's little Firefox could do to prevent it.

Wrong, they can just add DRM.

Even though you can't uninstall it, you can disable the extension on a per-user basis. Firefox looks in both per-user and system-wide locations to find installed addons. Only per-user addons can be removed by the user, in the addons dialog. System-wide extensions can be disabled per-user, but not uninstalled (disabling is almost the same thing). To uninstall a system-wide extension, hopfully the publisher has an unistall script, but worst-case, you can just delete the extension folder from the system-wide location. e.g. C:\Users\All Users\Mozilla\something on Windows.

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