Mozilla Firefox suddenly had all its Addons disabled due to a glitch. Many Firefox users around the world are browsing without their usual set of extensions after they suddenly stopped working earlier this evening. Extensions were displaying “could not be verified for use in Firefox and have been disabled” messages in the add-ons manager of the browser. Firefox would display “One or more installed add-ons cannot be verified and have been disabled” at the top as a notification next to that.
Extensions affected include LastPass, Ghostery, Download Manager (S3), Dark Mode, Honey, uBlock Origin, Greasemonkey, NoScript, and others.
If the users tried to reinstall the addons from the Firefox add-on site they were shown an error stating “Download failed. Please check your connection.”
In a statement provided to Engadget, Product Lead Kev Needham said:
We’re sorry that there is currently an issue where existing and new add-ons are failing to run or be installed on Firefox. We know what the issue is and are working hard to restore add-on functionality to Firefox as soon as possible. We’ll continue to provide updates via our Twitter channels. Please bear with us while we get the problem fixed.
For Firefox users that are currently being impacted by this bug, there is no easy workaround for them that doesn’t involve switching to another browser which is something most users are trying to avoid, as this would require porting all their tabs, history, and add-ons to a new browser, which is a very time-consuming operation. the issue is caused by a bug. If you read carefully, you notice that verification is the issue. A new thread on Bugzilla suggests that this has something to do with extension signing. All Firefox extensions need to be signed since Firefox 48 and Firefox ESR 52. Firefox will block the installation of extensions with invalid certificates (or none), and that is causing the issue on user systems.
The issue can only be resolved on Mozilla’s end. The organization needs to renew the certificate or create a new one to resolve the issue. I’d expect Mozilla to do that soon as the issue is widespread and affecting lots of Firefox users.