Armagadd-on redux: Certificate expiration caused Firefox to disable all add-ons

Enlarge / Firefox wasn’t feeling well over the weekend. The problem may not be fixed for everyone. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, the expiration of a Mozilla certificate used to check the signatures of add-on codes in Firefox desktop and Android Web browsers caused a nearly universal failure of Firefox plug-ins and extensions as browsers detected them as invalid and disabled them.

The bug, dubbed “armagadd-on 2.0,” was addressed by a hot-fix issued over the weekend, and a new version of the browser has been pushed out to some users. But users of the Android and Extended Support Release do not yet have a fix, and the workaround may not help them.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened with Firefox. The original “armagadd-on” happened almost exactly three years ago, on May 2, 2016, when an expired certificate caused signature verification errors for add-ons.