Annoying software is annoying

Specifically, I'm referring to Mozilla Firefox and it's incessant addon pestering, in various shapes and sizes. Ironically, the addons behaviour feels like the most bolted-on thing in Firefox.

Firstly, short of the sky falling, nothing should prevent software from getting to a usable state when the user performs the relevant action to start it (clicking a shortcut, invoking a link handler from another process.) Possibly the most annoying thing that Firefox does is pop a dialog up in your face telling you about how your addons have updates before the rest of the browser starts, bringing about (at least) two sub-annoyances:

1. It prevents you from actually using the software until you make a choice as to whether you want to update your addons or not;
2. If you happen to click multiple links (expecting them to all open in tabs), only the first one is handled while the rest vanish off into the ether.

I realise that, in someone's mind, this might have been a good idea because you can't update addons without restarting the browser, and that restarting the browser isn't what most people would call fast; but it really wasn't a good idea. At all. Ever.

Secondly, after having survived the first point and chosen to update your addons, you still have to watch progress bars slowly fill up and your browser restart, while you twiddle your thumbs. You are then assaulted with another addon dialog, informing you that the progress bars you just watched complete were actually addons, by the same name, being updated! If you're lucky then you are ready to start using your browser. If you're not so lucky, some of your addons (I'm looking at you, NoScript) have taken it upon themselves to provide additional annoyances, usually in the form of opening new tabs that explain very little about what you did not know and quite a lot about what you did already know.

There have been some attempts to openly discuss improving the current addon experience, although things seem rather quiet at this point in time, one can only hope that the Firefox team realises that there is a problem and maybe Firefox 4 will have teleportation, time travel and an improved addon experience.