Monday, June 8, 2009

Java (TM) Quick Starter Is Trying To Access The Trusted Zone. BOO!

On my PC with Firefox 3 and Windows XP SP3 with ZoneAlarm, every time I started Firefox, the Java Quick Start FF addon would throw an alarm for trying to access the internet.

Hold on there!

Who invited you to the party, anyhow? If you had knocked on the front door and asked to be installed, you would have had the door shut in your face. But you snuck in the back door, didn't you? THEN you refused to allow a lowly user to uninstall the Firefox addon.

FAIL.

Disabling this thing is easy. Log in to an account with administrative privileges and start the Control Panel. Open the Java applet. Click the Advanced tab. Click the plus sign next to Miscellaneous. Uncheck the Java Quick Start item. Apply. Close. Restart Firefox.

All gone! Thanks to the Internets and Jesus and Google for helping me to find this.

FYI this is actually a helpful little extension to Firefox, retrieving Java code before you need it, to speed page and program load times. But they went over the line of decency when they installed a program that reaches out to the Internet without asking. Bad form, Sun, bad form. Doubly bad when you realize that non power-users will ALSO have had the Yahoo! toolbar installed without so much as a by'er leave.

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