[jlgaddis]

They install "allow any connections to anywhere" firewall rules on Windows too. Fortunately, it's "just" for the Firefox process but still...

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I used to keep one last Windows 7 box around. It had the default firewall policies set to block everything by default and I had even went so far as to disable all the default rules that Windows creates and added explicit rules to only allow the specific traffic to the specific internal services I actually needed.

Then, I installed Firefox one day so I could use it to access a few internal web sites. Shortly afterwards, I went to add new firewall rules to allow connections to these internal web sites and discovered that the installer had automatically added new firewall rules for Firefox allowing it to connect to anything anywhere! Fortunately, this host was on a subnet which was blocked in the "real" firewall anyways, so -- in this case -- no actual harm done (it couldn't get out to the Internet anyways) but I was still a bit surprised to discover that.

Can you imagine the fallout and calls for beheading that would occur if Firefox for Linux added new rules to your Linux hosts' iptables firewalls!?