Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.
After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.
I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????
Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?
What the actual fuck???
I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.
And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?
It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.
I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.
Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.
I'm done.
You found a .sig file where you expected a .exe? Did Windows crash while the Mozilla Updater was running? Sounds like a file that’d be present to verify that a new copy of the .exe was legit and complete, but the .exe itself was never written to disk.
As shitty as Microsoft is, I don’t think they encrypted your Firefox.exe…
Ah that could be it. It was such a weird coincidence.
It's because 7 in 10 Windows programs update themselves instead of a global coordinated package management. It can happen they all update or check for updates in parallel, slowing or crashing everything else. Chrome even has a system service for that. This stuff is so overengineered and redundant.