Mozilla rolls out fix for Firefox certificate add-on issue

We reported this morning that Mozilla had a major issue in their hands as the company forgot to renew their security certificate that is used to sign Firefox add-ons.

The certificate expired causing new add-ons to fail and is stopping the existing add-ons from working.

Mozilla has now announced that they have rolled out a fix, saying:

Our team has identified and rolled-out a fix for all Firefox Desktop users on Release, Beta and Nightly. The fix will be automatically applied in the background within the next few hours. No active steps need to be taken to make add-ons work again.

Most users will have to take no action, but if you have disabled Studies, a feature Mozilla uses to do A/B testing for new features, you will need to re-enable it.

Firefox users can check if they have Studies enabled by going to:

Firefox Options/Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Allow Firefox to install and run studies (scroll down to find the setting)

Studies can be disabled again after the add-ons have been re-enabled.

The fix will take some hours to roll out. To check if you have the fix  you can enter “about:studies” in the location bar. If the fix is active, you’ll see “hotfix-update-xpi-signing-intermediate-bug-1548973” or “hotfix-reset-xpi-verification-timestamp-1548973.”

Microsoft is working on a more integrated fix for a future update which does not use Studies.

Read more at Mozilla’s blog here.

Thanks, Justin from Mozilla for the tip.