Mozilla has broken all extensions

Problem occured for me turning on my PC this evening (i estimate 9pm gmt?) and found all extensions disabled. (ie. ARGH ADVERTS EVERYWHERE :wink: )

Just about to sign off and try my laptop, which hasn’t been on in a day…

interested what’ll happen on there… Will it pick up the bug or fix it before it happens? :smiley:

1 Like

As expected, possibly due to the timezone change, my firefox is affected too. Now i’m using pale moon for the time being. God damn it, mozilla!

ETA: Ok, so… you have to enable telemetry and studies to get the temporary fix? Yeah… no, i’ll wait for the version update. What this is doing to firefox’s dwindling user share i can only guess.

2 Likes

To be fair this is the first major issue i’ve encountered on FF ever. And as issues go, while it’s a rather idiotic admin error of allowing a cert to expire, as errors go that isn’t a terrible one IMHO… And the fixes seem quick on the ground if you google them.

So i’ll give them a little slack for this :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Maybe a little but i still feel the damage is already done with some very very irate people letting everyone know just how mad they are and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

1 Like

You only have to enable studies for a minute or two. All the addons will re enable once the study loads in after restarting the browser. Once that’s done you can disable studies and telemetry again.

2 Likes

Slightly off-topic, but I have a friend who keeps trying to recommend Gab Dissenter browser to me, and I don’t exactly know how to tell him to fuck off with his trumpian browser I don’t want.

7 Likes

If you’re lucky your addons will start working immediately but you may have to wait hours for the hotfix according to their blog. I’ve seen many comments on twitter and askwoody confirming this and for some the fix doesn’t work at all. The latest update is saying there is still no permanent fix ready to be rolled out so this must be driving so many people away from firefox which would be a shame. I find it bizarre an expired cert should affect the addons the user has already installed.

1 Like

In addition to Firefox for Windows, I use Firefox for Android and Firefox ESR, and the studies-based temporary hack fix doesn’t even apply to those. So I’m stuck for a while. Like everyone else who’s been complaining, I’m also bothered by how much extra garbage I see on-line yesterday and today. It seems crazy to me that so many people put up with all that junk all the time. The ad networks are probably major drivers of broadband upgrades at this point.

But on the other hand. The mechanism that went haywire was intended to block malicious add-ons. Not too many years ago, many of us would have dismissed that as a paranoid concern, but today, I think most of us are likely to accept that’s a real possibility. The Firefox team was right to include that mechanism and hey, it works! That’s sort of good news! It was a management problem that allowed the cert to expire.

I am certainly inconvenienced but Firefox still works, I can still do whatever (trivial) research and planning I was doing last week.

I pay for Google Music and as part of that deal, YouTube is ad-free for me. I won’t tell you that I’m thrilled by the idea of shelling out small payments to a zillion separate organizations as an alternative to an advertising-dominated culture, but – something like that probably is the most realistic alternative to an advertising-dominated culture. I wish it were practical to spread the few dollars I can afford around more.

4 Likes

So, eventually, I managed to get Mozilla’s hotfix applied. As it turns out, if you have an antivirus package with SSL interception, the hotfix might get intercepted before it can be applied. In my case, disabling that was probably a good thing, as Kaspersky apparently uses a hillariously insecure cert for its man-in-the-middling and thus not only breaks this update, but also is useless and a genuine security risk.

As it turns out, the hotfix was pushed through Firefox’s “Studies” mechanism, which requires browser data collection to be turned on. I also, once I had disabled SSL Interception, had to go into about:config, and set app.normandy.first_run to True, then restart, in order to force the check. So this cert expiry/hotfix scenario has been nothing but a fiasco. Don’t let your certs expire people!

2 Likes

On a final note, browsing the Internet without ad blocking is, frankly, shocking. After years of using uBlock Origin, the un-ad-filtered Internet is essentially unusable. Youtube ads are amazingly bad, and several of the webpages I tried to visit had page redirecters that tried to redirect me to all sorts of shady horseshit. If this isn’t a case for legislatively banning advertising on the Internet, I don’t know what is.

6 Likes

Apparently, firefox 66.0.4 is in the pipeline and shortly to be officially released though there’s a link on ghacks if you want to risk installing a pre-release version.

2 Likes

they have it up on their official blog now. I updated (Android) and all my stuff came back, so, crisis averted. one day wasn’t so bad.

3 Likes

Got my desktop version back as well. Don’t get me wrong, i do really like firefox and how much control you have over it as a user but i do feel it’s lost its way a bit since the quantum release and the deprecating of useful features like live bookmarks or even stopping a gif from playing, which you used to be able to do but now need an extension for.

Speaking of this new version, it seems to have disabled my british english dictionary for spell checking.

2 Likes

Is that your favourite dictionary? What a colourful choice. :wink:

4 Likes

It’s the law over here, it’s the queen’s english afterall. None of that colonial spelling muck for her madge.

4 Likes

Are there any browsers around anymore that don’t have issues? I gave up on Firefox a couple of years ago because it was slow on my main machine (a 2009 model) and occasionally would eat up all my memory. (I still use it when running Linux.) I’m currently using Opera, which isn’t terrible, but it has so many built-ins that it spawns dozens of processes in the task manager when it starts, and it doesn’t allow navigation to the previous page with the backspace. Similar experiences with Brave and Vivaldi. On a new Windows 10 machine I played with Edge for a while, and thought it was surprisingly good, but since it is MS I assume it is full of telemetry, also I understand they are switching to the Chrome engine.

I remember being very happy with Mosaic in the 90s, everything seems to have gone downhill from there.

3 Likes

Why not try pale moon and waterfox? They’re both forks of firefox and although i’ve not tried waterfox i do use pale moon and it feels very much like a classic version of firefox before it went all bloated and confusing (i still don’t fully understand the cookies options). I would add that extension options for pale moon are kinda limited but you can still install the essentials like ublock origin and umatrix.

ETA: Having said all that… i’ve just been checking out the addons for pale moon and umatrix is no longer listed (i’m using an older version) but there is a fork for that called ematrix. This is the problem using a forked browser based on a legacy version of firefox i suppose so god bless the open source community for maintaining legacy addons.

1 Like

Aren’t derivatives like Pale Moon and Waterfox somewhat problematic because they don’t necessarily get Firefox’s security updates in a timely fashion?


On an unrelated note, it would be neat if someone illustrated a dramatic spike in web ad revenue corresponding to the onset of this bug.
1 Like

I have Pale Moon as a secondary browser on one machine. It is OK.

1 Like

I ran into this thing as well… enabling studies and restarting the browser brought the extensions back quickly. I then turned studies off, and everything is OK now.

1 Like