Mozilla released Firefox 66.0.4 to the Stable channel of the web browser; the new version fixes the add-on deactivation and signing issue in the browser.

Firefox users with installed add-ons experienced a frustrating and at the same time strange issue on May 4, 2019: Firefox would not load any add-ons and notify users that installed add-ons could not be enabled because they could not be verified by the browser.

The issue affected all browser extensions regardless of rating or freshness. Even Mozilla's own add-ons for Firefox were affected.

The disabling happened just a day after Mozilla revealed that it would go after extension policy violations more actively. Some users assumed that this was the reason for the disabling of extensions. Turned out, it was not.

The issue was caused by an expired certificate. Firefox could not verify extensions anymore because of the expiration, and the only recourse of the browser in that case is to disable all extensions that cannot be verified.

Problem was, the issue did not affect just one or two extensions that somehow got their certificates messed up, it affected all of them.

Mozilla started to distribute a hot fix to some Firefox channels, Firefox Stable, Beta and Nightly, but that required that users had Shield Studies activated. Not all wanted that because of privacy implications.

Others distributed Mozilla's fix on third-party sites so that anyone could install it and resolve the issue.

Update: Mozilla just released Firefox 66.0.5 which makes "further improvements to re-enable web extensions" for users, specifically those with master passwords set.

Firefox 66.0.4

Mozilla started to work on Firefox 66.0.4 and updates for other versions of Firefox at the same time. The new release is now available officially for download and distribution via Firefox's automatic update system.

Head over to this address https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ and download the update to your system.

The release notes have just one entry: "Repaired certificate chain to re-enable web extensions that had been disabled"

The update should resolve the issue for Stable channel users and Android users who also get the update.

Note: Firefox may display a message on start that one or more add-ons have been disabled. This happens if the intermediate patch was installed in the browser.

Only the hotfix-update-xpi-intermediate extension should be listed under unsupported. All other extensions should be listed under Extensions.

The hotfix extension is no longer needed as the issue is resolved in the updated version of Firefox.

Now Read: What Mozilla needs to do after the incident.

Summary Article Name Firefox 66.0.4: add-on signing fix Description Mozilla plans to release Firefox 66.0.4 to the Stable channel of the web browser soon; the new version fixes the add-on deactivation and signing issue in the browser. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

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