In a last effort for me to milk the Firefox add-on issue from over this weekend, and to at least let people who may find the page know what’s up, Firefox release 66.0.4 was made available yesterday and contains in its release notes:
“Repaired certificate chain to re-enable web extensions that had been disable”
The above link containing more details on the update, stating:
“A Firefox release has been pushed — version 66.0.4 on Desktop and Android, and version 60.6.2 for ESR. This release repairs the certificate chain to re-enable web extensions, themes, search engines, and language packs that had been disabled (Bug 1549061). There are remaining issues that we are actively working to resolve, but we wanted to get this fix out before Monday to lessen the impact of disabled add-ons before the start of the week. More information about the remaining issues can be found by clicking on the links to the release notes above. (May 5, 16:25 EDT) “
This comes after the release a few days ago of a “Firefox studies” package designed to help fix the add-on security signing issue from a few days ago.
Since automatic updates apply, well, automatically, Firefox users should have their browsers updated by now and, presumably, that should be that! Problem solved, let’s get on with our lives.
As a general piece of advice, if you’ve tried other methods to “fix” this issue yourself, now would be a great time (if you haven’t already) to, you know, not use those methods anymore. I mean, if you want to stay on the developer release of Firefox go for it – have fun – but the other methods that some have suggested on Reddit and the like, various homebrew patches and such, will probably do you more harm than good down the line, so if you haven’t already, get rid of them.
Some users are reporting that they do not have the “hotfix-update-xpi-signing-intermediate-bug-1548973” study active in “about:studies”. Rather than using work-arounds, which can lead to issues later on, we strongly recommend that you continue to wait. If it’s possible for you to receive the hotfix, you should get it by 6am EDT, 24 hours after it was first released. For everyone else, we are working to ship a more permanent solution. (May 5, 00:54 EDT)
There are a number of work-arounds being discussed in the community. These are not recommended as they may conflict with fixes we are deploying. We’ll let you know when further updates are available that we recommend, and appreciate your patience. (May 4, 15:01 EDT)
That’s pretty much it. I still don’t completely grasp the details of what went on, but at this stage it should (keyword, should) be resolved for most everyone.
More to come, as always.
