In an article entitled “Mozilla pushes out .NET incompatible Firefox 3.5” ZDNet’s Dana Blakenhorn says…

Firefox users got a surprise when they booted up this morning, a software update box for Firefox 3.5, “the most advanced Firefox yet.”

A warning sticker at the bottom of the box notes that it will cause “some of your extensions and/or themes to stop working until they are updated.”

…

But this list of incompatibilities carries just one name — Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant 1.0.

Interesting. Everything else is expected to work with the new Firefox except .Net, so it’s ready not just for download but ready to be pushed out with notes to all clients urging them to get it?

Now as I say with any article like this my aim is not to attack but simply to embarrass the author just enough to get him to do a little research in the future.  If Mr. Blakenhorn had done a simple Google search for “.Net Framework Assistant” it would have pointed him to a Wikipedia article named “Clickonce” that says…

Prior to .NET 3.5 SP1, ClickOnce worked only with Internet Explorer, although the FFClickOnce extension allowed Firefox to support it. Starting with .NET 3.5 SP1 and Firefox 3, a Firefox extension is silently installed by Microsoft when an update of the .NET framework is installed.

That’s what the .Net Framework Assistant does, it enables Clickonce (a technology that allows desktop apps to be installed with “one click” of a hyperlink).  It does not enable .Net itself.  Removing it will not disable any .Net applications either on the server side via ASP.NET or the client side via Silverlight. 

So what Mozilla really did was temporarily disable a feature that almost no one uses and which is easily worked around for anyone who would want to use it (just distribute an install file like every other app in the world).  In fact, the real irony is that Clickonce DIDN'T officially work in Firefox until about a year ago when .NET 3.5 SP1 was released (it's been around since 2005)