Firefox 66.0.4 almost ready with fix for disabled addons

Mozilla Firefox 66.0.4 is under preparation, and contains a fix for the expired middle-signing certificate, which resulted in the deactivation of all addons on Friday.

On Friday, Mozilla allowed to expire an intermediate certificate used to sign Firefox addons. Since Firefox requires addons to be signed by a valid certificate, once the certificate has expired, users will suddenly notice that all their Firefox addons have been disabled.

As a temporary solution, Mozilla has released an extension through its Normandy Study system that has installed a new intermediate signing certificate. Once the fix is ​​installed, the addons would be automatically re-enabled.

To use this system, you must activate the study system. In doing so, however, telemetry refers to Mozilla about how you use Firefox and some consider it a risk to privacy.

Even with the studies enabled, some users, including myself, report not receiving the patch.

Version 66.0.4 fixes an expired certificate without studies

Mozilla has started working on Firefox 66.0.4, which includes a new intermediate signing certificate that has not expired and will force the reverification of the signature.

Three candidate versions of Firefox 66.0.4 have been created. The first one was removed because it did not solve the addon problems properly. The third candidate version is the most recent and, in my tests, it correctly activated all the extensions and allowed me to install new ones.

Mozilla has also started to prepare release notes for 66.0.4, which will contain the following fix in the list of changes.

Certificate chain repaired to re-enable Web extensions that were disabled

Mozilla is slow to update the release notes until a candidate is pushed to publication.

Users should expect to see versions of Mozilla Firefox 66.0.4 released today or tomorrow. Even after its official release, the automatic update may take some time.

H / T Techdows.com