My experience preparing for the Firefox 57 add-on apocalypse

[James]

This stinks not only of an extension disabling enforcement but also a Firefox update enforcement too.

There were no Firefox updates that did this nor some ulterior conspiracy theory of motives blah blah ...

People were blaming Fx 66.0.3 even though it was released back on April 10th.

It was an unfortunate case of a intermediate certificate that well expired and many extensions were affected.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/05/04/update-regarding-add-ons-in-firefox/

The 66.0.4 and 60.6.2esr updates are not proof that it was indeed a Firefox problem but rather as a way to get people using their extensions again.

[LewS]

Well said James, there's something approaching hysteria in
many of the posts.

Mozilla does need to fix this: See Ghacks suggestion, which
seems to me to be the least they should do.

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/05/what- ... -disaster/

[greybeard2012]

It is the imposition of this that is what angers me. Perfectly good plugins are just summarily disabled and there is nothing you can do about it.

All down to the mantra of online security: if the plugin is not signed suddenly it is a 'threat'. Which means that for decades Mozilla has been hosting and allowing these threats to our security via their browser. It is just all a crock to keep us on the treadmill of updates and upgrades which reduce our choices, affect our browsing experience for little or no benefit for us.

Give us the choice whether to take the 'risk' that is all I am asking. I've been blocked from some perfect legitimate, safe web sites I've used for years recently simply because the web site's owners' certificates were wrongly configured. In the past you could add such web sites to the exclusion list, ignoring the supposed problem at your own risk. Now your not even allowed to do that and not just FF the latest update to Waterfox now does the same - choice lost forever.

One of the reasons I started using Waterfox was because of just such a web site certification problem with FF and using WF let get on that web site, contact the admin and get the problem sorted.

[Brummelchen]

Give us the choice whether to take the 'risk' that is all I am asking.

the risk is NOT solely on your own, a vulnerable firefox harms the system and the system strikes back into the web.

thats what most of the people forget and think, their "mighty" antivirus would fight it - BS
the regular settings of antivirus do not care about adware which behaves in some cases as a trojan download and you wont get it.
and if you sharpen settings it will blow the operating system, either in killing tasks, prohibiting system functions, or blow firefox.

for waterfox i can tell you it will jump onto firefox 68 esr and that will keep the legacy part complete out. though too short.

[James]

It is the imposition of this that is what angers me. Perfectly good plugins are just summarily disabled and there is nothing you can do about it.

All down to the mantra of online security: if the plugin is not signed suddenly it is a 'threat'....

NPAPI Plugins are not signed as what you are referring to are Extensions.

The only NPAPI Plugin that is allowed to run in Firefox since the Firefox 52.0 Release is the NPAPI Flash Player Plugin from Adobe. Though this will change in web browsers early next year but that is getting off topic.