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Unexpected by all – right? Microsoft has released an official Mozilla Firefox browser extension to answer the Window Media Player woes that hordes of users are all to familiar with. Check out the full news announcement and an available download for Windows users. This is a full plugin that requires an actual installation – and uninstallation from Add/Remove Programs.

If it seems cooler to you today in places where it’s normally fairly warm, or even burning hot, there may be deeper forces at work than mere global warming changes in the atmosphere. The department of Microsoft’s development team delegated to interoperability and open standards have released what might have seemed the least likely product ever to emerge from Redmond: an officially sanctioned Windows Media Player plug-in for Mozilla Firefox.

“When the [Open Source Software Lab] was created at Microsoft people thought it to be another Microsoft marketing ploy,” writes OSSL developer Hank Janssen on his team’s blog today, in a post entitled, “We’re Writing Firefox Plug-ins?.” “Well I can tell you that that is certainly not the case here at OSSL.”

OS X users can go ahead and ignore this news snippet and download their own copy of Flip4Mac – the Windows Media Player Quicktime component.