Many Firefox browser addons just suddenly stopped working due to the expiration
118 replies, posted
The waning popularity of every browser but Chrome is largely due to Google fucking with the web standards in such a way to gimp their competition. Google services such as Drive, Docs and Youtube genuinely work worse in anything that isn't Chrome. Chrome is shipped with a shitload of installers that default to installing it alongside the desired application too.
MS pretty much admitted as much when they moved Edge to a Chromium based renderer, despite the old renderer for Edge having a few benefits over Chrome at the time.
Mobile version of FF has always been second priority in terms of features and bugfixes so that's not surprising.
It didn't work for me until last night when they rolled out the official patch and I was hit with the issue Friday evening. The emergency patch deployed in the studies never appeared for me and I had to rely on using about:debugging to load my essential addons.
My math might be wrong or maybe I'm caught in some space-time oddity, but I'm fairly sure that Friday evening to Sunday evening is a bit more than "within a day".
The emergency patch didn't auto deploy for some and you had to run it manually from a link. Also oh no, a whole weekend without browser addons, life ruined.
Considering how multiple sites I've been on have had infected ads deployed? Yeah, going without adblocker and other security addons can be pretty bad.
Then just don't use the internet for a weekend or do so in limited capacity? Are you people completely unable to function in life without the internet or what?
You do realize that malware devs knew addons were disabled and could've taken advantage by stepping up their use of infected ads to target Firefox users? People who are often online would be especially vulnerable.
It was the weekend before finals. I kind of need the internet to review past lecture videos, download PDFs/Powerpoints/Word docs in order to make sure I have everything I need in my study guides. Which also means going to different sites in order to get a better explanation on something because my professor(s) explained something piss poorly.
Plus, binge watching stupid shit on youtube because I spent the past five hours studying.
Youtube runs like complete ass in Chrome for me. Had to reset some settings every week because half the time it would just show a black box and not play anything. Partly why I went back to Firefox.
What about people whose jobs or schoolwork require internet?
I've literally never had sites that were required for my work or schoolwork that were risky enough to merit noscript, adblock, and such. So maybe just don't browse the internet with zero regard for opsec and you'll be okay?
People have jobs that do require extensions, like React Developer Tools and the such. People who only have free time on the weekend to do their own projects (or if they're unlucky enough to work weekends) need these extensions to do work for specific browsers like Firefox. If their tools suddenly just decided to bail on them, then they can't do work because yes, they legitimately cannot function without these add-ons and the internet because their livelihoods depend on it.
If you're requiring specific extensions for work as a developer/etc then you're either probably smart enough to use addon debugging/the hotfix that was posted or your system admins were busy af rolling that out or installing another browser temporarily to people who were working.
Seems it doesn't affect Firefox forks though, as I'm using Waterfox and still can use add-ons without that hotfix lilguy was linking to earlier in this thread.
The hotfix debug did not roll out until the next day. You cannot fix the certification that Mozilla themselves forgot to renew because you have no access to it and rolling back did not work.
Yes the issue is resolved now, but it was enough to panic the internet because literally no one could fix it for themselves for almost an entire day. If you were crunching to finish a project over the weekend, then it was very much an issue. An unlikely scenario for most the general public who can use other browsers and have other ways on the internet, but there are definitely people out there who require very specific solutions to their projects. So please kindly stop taking the tone of being a dick and accept that yes, the panic was incredibly real for some people out there and yes it was an issue.
A workaround was discovered within 8 hours of it happening so? A whole day for a permanent fix yeah but the temporary workaround of addon-debugging was figured out literally within hours of the bug happening.
That's because they decided to fork off separately and retain classic Firefox functionality. I don't know the specific details to it, but basically they don't use the XPI extension signing that require the previously expired certification.
Apparently Tor browser and a few others had the same issue because they decided to retain the Firefox XPI extension functionality.
The same workarounds weren't functioning consistently across different installs. Many people were just boned.
Such is the life of many startup companies looking to go into the world. People putting in work on their own times without pay to deliver a product that they're trying to get their first investor on.
So, in my non-prescription products class, we had to do presentations on different topics. One group ended up picking the topic of "Accreditation of homeopathic products", or something similar to that. This meant going to websites that sold homeopathic products, and lemme tell you. Some of those sites are sketchy as fuck and very likely don't vet the ads they display on their websites.
You don't even have to go to sketchy sites to get nasty shit. I've known people that got stuff from wholly legit sites just because one of the ads was infected and it happened to slip through. We're not living in the benign 90s where the only way to get a virus or malware was by downloading something from an e-mail. Browsing the internet anymore without a basic adblocker is basically like fucking a bunch of people without protection: sooner or later, you're gonna get something nasty.
What happened is Google pushing their own browser and fucking over other browsers at every opportunity. It genuinely wouldn't surprise me if Google actually slowed down or outright removed it's search engine for non-Chrome browsers.
Dude you know that's not reasonable and you should know that many people literally aren't able to function in life without it as literally every professional and student needs access to the internet.
I forgot that with the invention of the internet we had to burn literally every book in existence too.
Yeah let me just run down to the library and pull the book on extracting shaders embedded in FBX files
My books are online.
If your online books are served with ads you bought them from a pretty shit place so again you guys continue to just keep making something out of nothing.
I use a fair few legacy addons so I was on an older version of Firefox when this problem happened to me, I said fuck it and finally took a friend's advice and switched to Waterfox, I was really shocked at how easy it was to migrate all my shit over to it, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to update while retaining legacy addon support.
You are literally treating the internet like it's a novelty.
There's plenty of valid reasons to have issues with this, in addition to my apparently stupid points of online work and schoolwork. Many people, for example, get their primary sources of entertainment online anymore. For me I stream a lot of content from lpers on Youtube. On top of the ads (I had fucking FOUR minute long video ads in a 20 minute video while my adblockers weren't working) there's also the fact that the site is simply far more unusable without my addons. I use Youtube Enhancer to fix up a number of the issues with it and I also have a user script to disable their shitty Polymer layout which performs horribly on Firefox and looks like ass. (Because the only way to disable it now is to add "&disable_polymer=1" to the end of the url. For every page load. Otherwise it automatically re-enables Polymer.)
You're acting like the internet is something minor when in reality for most people in the modern world, it's a pretty major part of their lives in some way. So simply "not using the internet for a day" isn't really the biggest option for many people. And considering how many people have limited free time to begin with, especially in places like the US, it's not unreasonable for people to be annoyed at their free time being negatively impacted. It's far less unreasonable than you're trying to paint it and you're coming across as fairly insincere compared to your normal posts.
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