Hardware & Technical Firefox being considered a virus by IE???

[Leadfoot]

Just this last Monday I used Firefox to work with an on-line course we're taking with St Petersburg College. They specified that they highly recommend Firefox as the browser of choice for some odd reason. Fine. I've been using Firefox on and off for over two years now with no issues.

Tuesday, there was an issue. Today as well. Here's what's happening:

Clicked on the icon to start it up (I have it set to open to a blank page). Clicked on bookmark and selected the college log-in page. Nothing, just the icon spinning around waiting for something to come back. Tried going to Google and Yahoo web pages as a test, same thing. Nothing comes in. Closed Firefox and this dialog box comes up:

Firefox has stopped working. Close program / check for a solution and close program.

Ok, so something odd has happened. Tried this about 6 times and finally gave up. Fired up IE and went and did the course for the evening. After finishing, went to the Mozilla website and clicked the download button to re-download and reinstall the program. Worked just fine after that.

This evening, same thing. Here's the error message:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: firefox.exe
Application Version: 44.0.1.5879
Application Timestamp: 56b54c20
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.19135
Fault Module Timestamp: 56a1c6fa
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0002e509
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

Now, seeing this, I tried to go back to Mozilla and get it again. This is the really, really odd part of this problem. I click on either download or save-as and I get this little        at the bottom of the screen:

Firefox Setup Stub 44.0.1.ext is unsafe to download and was blocked by SmartScreen Filter.

I don't want to appear paranoid or anything, but I get the impression that M$ is purposely blocking Firefox from working or being downloaded.

BTW, I managed to fire up Safari and download Firefox again, ran it, but after closing the program it has the same problem (opens but won't connect to anything).

Any ideas as to what's going on here? I'm using Win7, IE 11, Firefox is 44.0.1

 

[Leadfoot]

And just a follow-up posting here in case anyone else has this problem, I may have found a solution. IE has a smart screen filter in the "tools" menu. Click "turn off smart screen filter" and you get a dialog box with the button ready to be pressed that turns the filter off. If you click OK it does that. Firefox started working again. I was able to turn the filter back on now and Fox still works. Nice M$, thanks for screwing with someone else's program. Imagine that, calling your competitor a virus.

 

[X-Terminator]

I don't see why IE is not compatible with Facebook Voice & Video Calls. It wasn't at first and now they all have fallen out. It's all quite pathetic - seriously, it's not good for humanity to be this way. Then we have all these other incompatible VOIP programs to chose from: Skype, Line, Viber We Chat, etc. It divides nations right now. It needs sorting out to stop Monopoly greed.

 

[Asp Explorer]

It needs sorting out to stop Monopoly greed.

You should try working with IBM and Cisco

On the consumer side - well, there are plenty of options for everyone. Some are incompatible with others by design, and some are incompatible with others due to circumstances beyond their control. Once upon a time, you could start a VOIP call with BT, move out of range of your wifi network, and it would "seamlessly" migrate to xG and the call continued.

They then wondered why on earth their channels were clogged up and bleeding revenue - and a huge percentage of their traffic wasn't even theirs.