SO, a short while ago, my FireFox notified me it had disabled all add-ons it could not verify. This apparently included every add-on I had, including AdBlock, NoScript, and other protective add-ons. And guess what? You can’t download them again, you can’t download any add-ons as far as I can tell.
So I did a little searching and it turns out that every version across the board will disable almost all its addons at midnight UTC 5/4 (by the system clock).
There’s a lot of user discussion on the internet (mostly me too type), but absolutely nothing on the Mozilla site, as far as I can tell.
So, has Mozilla shot itself in the head? To let a bug of this magnitude happen and then not react quickly could change its reputation across its user community.
Bug report “Summary: Firefox marked addons due signing as unsupported, but doesn’t allow re-downloads from AMO → All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert”
I just ran across this myself. I was downloading an English subtitle file for a movie from a site when both of my ad-blockers (Adaware, Ublock Origin) were disabled and couldn’t be redownloaded (giving messages that the files were corrupt.) I thought that the (usually no more intrusive than the ads here) subtitle site had possibly somehow deactivated my plugins and downloaded the Firefox APK (I’m on my phone right now) reinstalled it, synched my account and still couldn’t reinstall my ad blockers. Wish I had seen this before I went through all the hassle.
There may be more than one way of doing it. As I recall, what I did involved some obscure about:config setting that resulted in the “Updates” section of the “Options” settings reading “Updates disabled by your system administrator”, and the “Update” button greyed out. Still working fine.
I just realized what killed my tabs – I had practically everything open using their Multi-Account Containers extension. Dead extension = dead tabs. :mad:
Firefox could ruin it’s user base just like Netscape did in the late 90’s.
Netscape was the most popular browser for several years. I can’t recall all the details but frustration with it’s development after AOL bought it, caused users to find a different browser. Ironically, Microsofts IE6. I remember shifting to IE6 and really liking that browser. Until Microsoft went to other more bloated versions.
I would have thought Mozilla would have remembered that lesson then.
I still use Firefox, but Chrome is my primary browser. It works better on my phone.
I still have no issues with Firefox on which I had disabled updates on my main (Windows 7) PC. But it did affect Firefox on my Android tablet. If this problem isn’t fixed soon I’m going to have to temporarily disable Internet connectivity and then disable updates on my other computers that have Firefox.
I was having all sorts of 'puter problems last night, this being the main one, but other, unrelated software giving me agita also. I also have auto-updates disabled & was actually on a slightly outdated version of FF. My ‘fix’ was to go to bed & deal with it all today. Your fix worked & I’m back in business…for now.
Still no issues on my PC Firefox which had updates disabled. I was able to fix the Android version on my tablet by setting xpinstall.signatures.required to “false”. I presume it will update itself at some point so this won’t be necessary. The problem on the tablet was that the Ublock Origin addon had stopped working.
I just popped in to post this. I woke up, sat down on my computer and saw that my add-on manager still had nothing listed. I poked around a little, then ended up on the bugfix page (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548973 ), saw this “temporary fix”, checked to see if I had the “studies” enabled (I did), went back to my add-on manager, and there they all were!
I remember shifting to IE6 and really liking that browser. Until Microsoft went to other more bloated versions.