Incorrect, this is about Browser market share, and thus (because the most popular browser only runs on one companys operating system) operating system market share. Microsoft has the largest share of the browser market which is what they are trying to protect by using these underhand tactics. If Adobe were to kill their Firefox Flash plugin they would have nothing to gain. When, on the other hand microsoft disables their Silverlight plugin for Firefox (or perhaps the Mac version of Silverlight) they have in fact quite a lot to gain. Your other arguments fail for the same reason.

To answer your question, No, it is in fact a bad thing. This is another instance of a typical microsoft strategy called "Embrace - Extend - Extinguish". To see how this works see the comment from the poster below:

Microsoft have embraced Firefox by writing software for it, Extended it's functionality to add support for their own proprietary "standards" and now they are trying to extinguish Firefox by forcing Mozilla to remove a plugin that some users have come to rely on. If microsoft were serious about adding functionality to Firefox then they would have contributed source code to this open source project. One good thing has come from this though, the rug has been pulled from under this plugin quite early, probably before many users have become dependent on it, because it was only a matter of time (probably a few years) before microsoft withdrew this plugin themselves in an attempt to force users back to IE.

Easily explained, firstly you assume wrong! It is of course much easier to count all lines in all java files to come up with the 12M figure. Taking out the generated code (which accounts for about 50% of the codebase), the actual number of genuine lines (excluding comments/white space) is probably closer to the 3M mark. As for why it's this big, it is a very large enterprise banking application (Our database for example is at 575 tables and counting) that has been worked on by a team of about 30 developers for the last 8 years. Now, roughly doing the numbers, that's: 3000000 lines / 8 years = 375000 lines per year 375000 / 30 = 12500 lines of code per developer per year, OR 12500 / 220 = 56 new lines of code per developer per day. Personally, I wrote more than twice that number of lines of code so far today, but then Java is a verbose language.