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Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-On Outage Posted

posted by martyb on Friday May 10 2019, @09:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-browser-will-you-use-to-read-the-report? dept.

canopic jug writes:

Eric Rescorla has a blog post over at Mozilla about the technical details on the recent Firefox add-on outage. He covers the background of how they use certificates, how they tried to mitigate the damage from the outage, how they worked to solve the problem without breaking more things, deployment of the replacement certificate, and why it took so long to fix.

Recently, Firefox had an incident in which most add-ons stopped working. This was due to an error on our end: we let one of the certificates used to sign add-ons expire which had the effect of disabling the vast majority of add-ons. Now that we've fixed the problem for most users and most people's add-ons are restored, I wanted to walk through the details of what happened, why, and how we repaired it.

There were a lot of work arounds discussed here and elsewhere, some of them quite stupid so, lastly, remember to undo any temporary work-arounds that might have been deployed last weekend.

Earlier on SN: In Firefox All Extensions Disabled Due to Expiration of Intermediate Signing Cert

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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:19PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:19PM (#842097)

    I'm not going to donate my time to support people who figuratively use IE6. If you think the new version is shit, pick up one of the many forks.

    If you think old versions should be supported, pay for the maintenance yourself rather than demanding others do so.

    You aren't a customer, you are the recipient of a gift.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:33PM (#842102)

    I'm pretty sure if 90% of firefox developers went away it would be better off.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:05PM (#842120)

    It would be a match made in a cesspit if you really are one of FF devs.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Friday May 10 2019, @11:20PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday May 10 2019, @11:20PM (#842129) Journal

    1. This is not a normal bug. It is a bug that prevents people to restore the old browser from a backup and keep working. People will hate FF for this.

    2. The browser is not an application, it's a virtual OS. The sites are the applications. As some applications still require some old OS, so does for example one of my home banking (hello java), and there are horror stories of other sites requiring SPECIFIC versions of java.
    So 'just update your browser' is like 'just update your OS', often unfeasible.

    --
    Account abandoned.