Google Is Evil - Daily News, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler is fed up with Apple, Microsoft and Google installing software plug-ins, without permission, into the company's popular Firefox Web browser. So much so that he told the tech giants in a post on his blog this week to "stop being evil," evoking the Google mantra of "don't be evil." AsaDotzler"Why do Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others think that it is an OK practice to add plug-ins to Firefox when I'm installing their software packages," Dotzler wrote.
"When I installed iTunes, in order to manage my music collection and sync to my iPod, why did Apple think it was OK to add the iTunes Application Detector plug-in to my Firefox web browser without asking me?" Dotzler, who is Mozilla's community coordinator, wrote that Microsoft sneaked in its Windows Live Photo Gallery and Office Live plug-ins without his knowledge before criticizing Google. "What makes Google think it's reasonable behavior for them to slip a Google Update plug-in into Firefox when I installed Google Earth or Google Chrome (not sure which one caused this) without asking me first?" he wrote.
"This is not OK behavior. I downloaded and installed a specific application from these vendors intending to have only that application installed, and without my consent that application foisted additional software on me." Dotzler compared the practice to using Trojan Horse Internet viruses.
"In my book, that fits the definition of a trojan horse. Yes, that is precisely how a trojan horse operates. These additional pieces of software installed without my consent may not be malicious but the means by which they were installed was sneaky, underhanded, and wrong.
