Mozilla has finally released Firefox 66.0.4 which addresses a certificate issue which caused many Firefox users’ extensions to become disabled. The hiccup occurred on Friday, May 3rd and, as a result, many users flocked to forums such as Reddit to see just what was going on. For users on desktop, Mozilla was fairly quick to push a temporary fix via the Studies programme but this didn’t extend to the ESR or Android versions of the browser.
In a blog post, Kev Needham from Mozilla’s add-ons team said:
“A Firefox release has been pushed — version 66.0.4 on Desktop and Android, and version 60.6.2 for ESR. This release repairs the certificate chain to re-enable web extensions, themes, search engines, and language packs that had been disabled. There are remaining issues that we are actively working to resolve, but we wanted to get this fix out before Monday to lessen the impact of disabled add-ons before the start of the week.”
While the new update fixes a ton of issues that users will have faced, it doesn’t solve them all. Some users may notice the following issues:
- A small number of add-ons are listed as unsupported or may not appear in about:addons, the data isn’t lost and users should be able to re-install the add-ons and recover the data.
- Add-ons that use container functionality may have lost site data or custom configurations and may need to be set up again.
- Themes may not have automatically been re-enabled but users can re-enable them manually in about:addons.
- Home page and search settings that were customised by an add-on may have been reset to default, requiring users to customise the settings again.
It’s not clear whether Mozilla plans to fix these issues in another point release or just wait for the next major release of the browser which is slated for May 14.