Mozilla has just released an update for Firefox that fixes the issue related to disabling add-ons for the vast majority of its users over the weekend.
“A new version of Firefox has been released – version 66.0.4 for Desktop and Android and version 60.6.2 for ESR. This release fixes the certificate chain to re-enable extensions, themes, search engines, and language packs that were disabled,” Kev Needham, a member of the Firefox Add-ons team, said today
"There are remaining issues and we are actively working to resolve them, but we wanted to fix this one before Monday to reduce the impact of disabled add-ons before the start of the week," Needham added.
If you're not a Firefox user and wondering what this issue is, the update comes to address the biggest problem in the organization's history.
On the night between Friday and Saturday, May 4th at 12:00 AM, the digital certificate used by Mozilla to sign Firefox add-ons (also known as extensions) expired. Mozilla used this certificate to verify that the extensions installed on users' browsers are the same extensions hosted on the official Mozilla Add-ons portal.
Once the certificate expired, Firefox browsers were unable to verify the authenticity of the extensions installed and immediately disabled all add-ons in the browsers.
Additionally, users could not re-enable extensions, nor could they install new ones from scratch for the same reason, leaving Mozilla's more than 100+ million users without a way to re-enable extensions.
The temporary patch was criticized
Users discovered various hacks to re-enable the extensions, as did Mozilla, which released a temporary patch just hours after the certificate expired.
This interim update used the built-in Firefox Studies feature to add support for a new signing certificate.
However, this temporary solution did not reach all users. This is because “Firefox Studies” was disabled for users who did not agree to send telemetry data to Mozilla.
The good news is that Mozilla does not expect any new problems after the Firefox 66.0.4 update, which should fix the “disabled add-ons” issue for all users.
