🥇Today, many popular add-ons for Firefox have stopped working due to certificate issues

Hello, dear Habr users!

I want to warn you right away that this is my first publication, so please notify me of any issues, typos, or anything else you notice.

This morning, as usual, I turned on my laptop and started a leisurely surf in my favorite Firefox (version 66.0.3 x64). Suddenly, the morning ceased to be serene — at one unfortunate moment, a message popped up saying that some addons couldn't be verified and had been disabled. "Great!" I thought and delved into the addons control panel.

And… what I saw there somewhat shocked me, to put it mildly. All the addons were disabled. HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, uBlock Origin, FVD SpeedDial, and several other addons that had been working perfectly until today were marked as outdated.

My first reaction was, oddly enough, a housewife-like thought: "A virus!" However, common sense prevailed, and the first thing I did was try to restart the browser. Useless. I tried reinstalling the addons — I received a terse “Download failed. Please check your connection” from the addon manager when attempting to install anything. "Aha!" I told myself and realized that the issue, apparently, wasn't with me.

Contacting my colleagues, I found out that they were experiencing the same issues with the browser. A quick Google search revealed a recent bug report on Bugzilla, a small thread on Reddit and this. a news itemAs it turned out, starting today (May 4, 2019), extensions that have not received verification from Mozilla under their new rules, which were supposed to be implemented in June, have stopped working as "unsigned". As it turns out, there were problems with the certificate on Mozilla's side that signed the extensions, and its validity period had expired.

The cause of such a widespread failure — whether it was a bug on Mozilla’s side, or a decision to ‘proactively’ block popular add-ons to force their re-verification under updated rules — is currently unclear. What is clear is that this issue will affect a vast number of users — after all, Firefox is primarily valued for its add-ons, so the consequences of today’s failure are uncertain. But let's leave these speculations to analysts and couch experts, as a devoted user, I’m primarily interested in when my extensions will be fixed. There is no answer to this question yet; I hope it happens as soon as possible. For now, the problem remains in a ‘confirmed’ status but is not yet resolved.

As a workaround, switching to 'nightly' builds is suggested, where you can disable add-on checks, or some Manipulations with the user profile (it didn’t help me, unfortunately).

Thank you to everyone who read this for your attention!

UPD: All users of the browser found their extensions blocked due to the expiration of the certificate used for generating digital signatures. As a workaround for restoring access to extensions, Linux users can disable digital signature verification by setting the ‘xpinstall.signatures.required’ variable to ‘false’ in about:config. This method works only in Linux for stable and beta releases; for Windows and macOS, a similar manipulation is only possible in nightly builds and in the Developer Edition. Alternatively, you can also change the system clock to a time before the certificate expiration . Thank you for the addition rsashka!

UPD2: I added a poll (not sure why I didn’t think to do this right away) to see how widespread the issue is.

UPD3: Thank you AnatoliyTkachev for the reference to guide for the workaround. I solved the problem with a script, as it required the least effort.

UPD4: the developers wrote, who have developed a temporary solution

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