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Armagadd-on 2.0, Mozilla expired certificate disables add-ons
No, the culprit you are losing add-ons isn't your computer, or maybe your old FF, or dropping of Webextensions API. Twitter, Reddit, everyone is wondering what is going on. This Armagadd-on 2.0 has a simple explanation: Mozilla forgot to renew certificates, and so add-ons are failing like if they were not properly signed, because technically they are not. Even signing of new add-ons is down (see comment 9). Great weekend at Mozilla HQ!
Some workarounds, until they clean up the mess, include playing with the computer clock (NTP? forget it) or disabling signature checks (not possible in default releases).
All Firefox extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0
Steps to reproduce:
Wait until it's past midnight on 2019-05-04 UTC.
Actual results:
All addons got disabled due not having valid signature.
Expected results:
If the signature was due to expire, it should have been renewed weeks ago. Not all extensions were disabled. Fakespot and Google Scholar Button were left in their disabled state.
Some reports on reddit says that they had their clocks a day forward, but they may be just early canaries for the actual widespread issue.
Going backwards in time allows installation from AMO (Mozilla Add-ons) but do not remove the unsupported mark from the add-ons already installed.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548973
Workaround: Go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:07PM (4 children)
Here is the official fix. [mozilla.org] "The fix will be automatically applied in the background within the next few hours. No active steps need to be taken to make add-ons work again."
I am truly disappointed that Mozilla did not post that information on their front page. I went back to their front page (mozilla.org) and counted four clicks until the information for which I was searching was displayed. (It took me more than four clicks initially but I went back and counted them knowing where I wanted to end up. I am also aware that not everyone finds using computers particularly easy.) If we assume Firefox is used by 10% of web users, and we assume that maybe one billion people use the web on a daily basis... that means this issue has just affected one hundred million people. Do you not think that Mozilla might have woken their technical team, their legal team and their webmaster... and pasted something appropriate on their front page?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:04PM (1 child)
Perhabs this is just an april fools joke gone too far? (Devuan)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @12:40AM
You certainly get that feeling because it's not on the front page of Mozilla. Talk about adding insult to injury...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @08:37PM
Running one of the esr (extended release) versions, I didn't want to wait around for Moz to get their act together.
This...
> Workaround: Go to about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false
...came from The Fine Article and it worked for me.
All I wanted was to keep EFF's Privacy Badger working and that did it.
Q for anyone: is there any reason to set "xpinstall.signatures.required" back to true? I'm pretty happy to trust EFF on general principles.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday May 06 2019, @02:49AM
The fix that worked well for me was as detailed here:
https://fossbytes.com/firefox-extensions-disabled-by-glitch-how-to-enable-firefox-extension-again/ [fossbytes.com]
Stuffed if I'm ever going to enable Studies. I'd actually found this fix on Reddit but since then the subreddit and my comment have disappeared...
I stumbled across this just before too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bkxa1h/on_the_privacy_implications_of_using_studies_to/ [reddit.com]