[shadowgovt]

I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a long time there was a chunk of code in the Mozilla code base that hunted for several browser extensions in Windows every time the browser started up and did some patch up work in the file system to make sure that those extensions could be found in the browser because some older installers would dump them in non-standard places. This was to avoid the issue that if the user had already installed the application with the corresponding extension and it was working in Internet Explorer, it wouldn't automatically work in Firefox without this patch up process. And in that case, it wasn't the extension that was broken from the user's point of view... It was Firefox.

Some technologies are so fundamental to the web experience that when they break, the user perceives the browser to be broken, not that technology.

[eastbound]

I bet the AskBar was always in the perfect standard place for Firefox to find it, despite being run by Oracle (Yes, Oracle installers for Java included the AskBar. A crime in my opinion).