I was preparing for another late night of getting articles out for you when, while chatting with a friend on Facebook I got an alert that one of the plugins I use on the site was no longer active. I was surprised, but thought little of it until I noticed I was seeing ads on the site as well.
I don’t hide that I use adblockers – I have a great many reasons for personally using such which I may get into in the future. That’s not the point here; my focus is that seeing ads alerted me that something was broken, and when I looked at my brower toolbar I noticed none of my plugins were active!
So, I checked the plugins section to discover every last one was disabled. Wonderful.
I checked my other machines (incidentally, all Mac’s, even though my main computer is a Windows machine) and these were fine, so I figured “okay, Firefox broke, let me uninstall and reinstall, then sync things again.”
That didn’t work. Damn.
As it would turn out, this is an issue directly on Mozilla’s end, as per this post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bkfte9/if_you_have_issues_with_your_addons_being_marked/ in reference to
this bug report.
Wonderful. It’s a problem with the certificate system that Mozilla uses. Now, I’m not going to explain it here, partially because it would be incredibly tedious and I don’t fully grasp the issue. I do understand it enough to know what in general is going on, which is also enough to be really really annoyed by it for more than the obvious reasons.
To put it simply, a security check based on the time and date is checking as false, rather than true, and as a result Firefox is disabling plugins which it considers no longer valid, even though they should be fine…. if they had bothered to renew the certificate, or so my understanding of the root cause of the issue is – they (presumably accidentally) let it expire!
In other words, stuff is royally broken, to put it politely.
Understand that I’m a big Firefox user. I prefer the way the Gecko engine renders pages, the general ethics and strategy that Mozilla has and operates by, and just the overall nature of Firefox as a product — both personal and practical reasons make me a Firefox user, so for an issue like this to come up when the Firefox team normally does incredibly well by me is, well, it’s something.
If you look at various comments regarding this, many are threatening to move to other browsers, or suggesting that issues like this would push people towards other options, such as Chrome. I can’t say I blame them, and as much as I hate those kinds of “let me be an asshole to something I don’t like when something bad happens” posts many make (yes, even me, I’m a hypocrite, so what) I can’t say I disagree with them here. This is a pretty big problem, and this is past the line, even for me, and I usually can tolerate quite a bit.
As annoying as this is, however, it still isn’t something that would make me move away from Firefox, and even if I was to do such, it sure as hell wouldn’t be Chrome – I’d rather use Opera or Safari (were that sill available for Windows). Firefox is what works best for me on the web and, especially since the Firefox Quantum series of releases, it’s been an experience I’ve been pleased with for easily 15 years now.
With that said, this does cause me some inconvenience, to say the least – certainly wrecking my workflow, putting my systems at risk (as many security plugins I use are obviously inactive now) and otherwise hindering much of how I use the web.
While the problem hasn’t hit all of my active machines yet, it has affected at least one other at the time of me writing this, and seems ot have been an issue that began happening about 3 hours ago, again, from the time of me writing this.
As I opened with, I’m not alone – many are experiencing this problem (hell, you’re probably reading this thanks to it) and are pissed. I have no doubt, however, it will be resolved, and things will go back to normal. Mozilla will see where they made mistakes; one mistake, in the case of mitigating the issue, by not easily allowing us to disable add-on signing without using a developer version of Firefox; and hopefully work to ensure something this grand doesn’t happen again.
So as it stands, while the browser still works fine, every extension and add-on, at this moment, is effectively broken, all due to digital signatures becoming invalid on accident, and us, as users, not having control to negate this check till the issue is fixed.
What a fucking mess, but you know what? Once it’s fixed, Firefox will be that much better. Yeah, for those who say I’m too negative, this is me being positive, and looking on the bright side of this.
Still doesn’t change I’m kind of ticked off right now.
UPDATE: A fix has been released for this issue:https://www.xadara.com/2019/05/a-fix-has-been-released-for-last-nights-firefox-addon-issue/
June 5 2019 firefox still not working, uninstalled and re installed multiple times. Did not install add ons. Firefox crashes and then upon open shows msg close old firefox. Cannot stop process in task manager. Only way to stop process is to reboot computer.