I only had a couple that had been "unauthorized" -- they didn't update automagically when the fix add-on went by, so I just "re-added" them, which caused them to be re-enabled (no download happened). All better now.

It's not about freedom, censorship or dictatorship. It's called "somebody made a mistake"...I've noted in my long career that if a person never makes a mistake, they're probably not doing anything!

I sure hope you don't make a mistake and turn your 'puter into a zombie and spew garbage about the 'net....

Good Luck.

1 members found this post helpful.

All is back to what passes for normal with Firefox.

IMO, there are two mistakes:

1. Not renewing the certificate (obviously).
2. Having the system retroactively deem already installed addons as "insecure" when the certificate expires. In a properly programmed system, #1 would have only broken installation of new addons.

I saw this question and thought I would post a fix I used. I have some warnings capitalized because I also posted this same fix in a less technical forum

IF YOU WANT TO FIX THE PROBLEM, READ THIS. THIS WORKS ON ALL WINDOWS, LINUX AND MAC.

It got caused by a certificate expiring. Firefox no longer allows add-ons not built under the new system. Since this caused a problem, Firefox made an emergency patch to turn it back on. The problem is the patch has not made it to everyone yet. To get your addons working follow the following steps.

1. Go into "about:config" using your URL bar. Keep in mind that this a very dangerous menu. Be extremely careful what you touch.
2. Search for "app.normandy.run" .
3. Set the value to 1
4. Restart browser
5. If this fixes it then be sure to set the value back to 21600 and restart browser. If it doesn't, go to step 6)


optional:
6) You should still have you value set previously to 1.
7) Go to the three bars in top right - > preference -> privacy and security -> Firefox Data Collection and Use
8) Turn on "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" if you have it off.
9) Turn on "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" . Note that this puts you browser in a very "beta" like mode and should never be left running like this unless you know want it running like that.
10) Restart your browser. Your add-ons now work again.
11) Be sure to turn off "Allow Firefox to install and run studies"
12) If you don't want Firefox collecting interaction and technical data then turn off "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"
13) Be sure to set the value of "app.normandy.run" back to 21600
14) Restart your browser.
15) MAKE SURE YOU SET EVERYTHING BACK TO NORMAL AND RESTART YOUR BROWSER. MAKE SURE YOUR EXTREMELY CAREFUL IN THE ABOUT:CONFIG MENU . IF YOUR NOT COMFORTABLE MESSING AROUND IN THAT MENU THEN GET SOMEONE TECHNICAL TO DO IT FOR YOU. THERE IS A REASON WHY FIREFOX HAS HUGE WARNING MESSAGE WHEN YOU MESS IN THAT AREA.

6.0.6.1 ESR Slackware - still broken here, ~18 hours after first noted occurrance.

My fix will be to try to finally say bye-bye to Firefox. I can't live with someone else being able to bork my browser security by remote control for whatever reason. The reason, expired cert or other incompetence, no longer matters - the existence of such a mechanism with ability to do this, with no user ability override is unacceptable.

How is it even possible for someone, anyone, unknown to me and with no say-so AT ALL on my part, to disable my currently working, frequently updated, current first line of browser safety and privacy... no more.

But admittedly there are very few alternatives... Vivaldi, maybe Opera... back to text only... maybe it is time to just pull the plug for good...

UPDATE: This update posted from my new Vivaldi browser... very nice! Hope it lasts..

1 members found this post helpful.

3 of 4 have been affected and all are updated/upgraded 3x a week or so....they are all current.
i only use adblocker ultimate and now all of the pops just inundate my browser windows.
weird that my computers were hit so late compared to many. strange.

I was using a special Nightly build called "firefox-fuckPA" that enables ALSA and not requiring PulsAudio as a go-between and until a few hours ago all was well. Then I installed Firefox 60.3 ESR which worked nicely all in all for a few hours and not only did my addons almost all get dumped into "Unsupported" but a number of settings were wiped out all at the same time. At first I naturally thought this was an ESR thing since many addons are not supported in ESR so I deleted the symlink to ESR and remade the link to Firefox Nightly 58FPA and although most of my setting were back in play, addons were still screwed up until I did the "about:config rpinstall false" toggle whereby most were reactivated. However after a few minutes I toggled back and again lost them all. I can't check "Studies allow" as it is greyed out so I guess I just wait.

In the words of

Almost daily now I am regretting donating to Mozilla which is particularly upsetting considering they were actual revolutionary pioneers in FOS with Netscape. Oh how the mighty have fallen Q_Q

So both my Mint laptops were affected this evening. Easily rectified by me through enabling Studies, letting the patch do its job (with a restart, but I don't know if that was required), and then disabling Studies again.

I'm pretty irked that the patch came through Studies though. I support a number of Windows/Firefox users and they won't have Studies enabled (I disable stuff like that routinely) so I'm now waiting for the support calls to come in. On the other hand, I haven't had any such calls yet, which ties in with my experience of less technical types: "Hydrurga, I've a little problem here that's been going on for a couple of months now" (when I've told them all to contact me asap if anything goes wrong).

Now if the patch had come through an update (66.0.4, say) then that would have been much simpler. Ok, so Mozilla would probably have had to do some mucking around with the original version slated to be 66.0.4 in order to turn it into 66.0.5, but that's incumbent on them.

I'm looking forward to the analysis on this once everything's back in shape. Hopefully Mozilla will be up-front and in-depth when it comes to explaining what went wrong and how they went about rectifying it.

went back to chromium - and yes i used it for a while since firefox never did anything for me. i hate the connection to google. BUT i have to say it works fine and the adblocker works and i noticed that it is si much more speedier opening the app and loading pages than firefox. Tor was not going to work for my needs. but seeing all of the nonsense ads pop up in firefox today was disgusting....

That doesn't work.

That's not so. I have Firefox from the MX Linux repo. Most of the extensions vanished.

That didn't work for me. They are still missing. I tried re-downloading and re-installing them and I get an error message. "Download failed. Please check your connection." There is nothing wrong with my connection.

To be fair, it's more like a bomb on a timer than a remote control

This is one of the most embarrassing things I have seen in a long time, especially from a company/group that was once a pillar of the opensource community.

Firefox is being true to their name anyway, because this burned. I know people that were in the middle of doing actual work via their browsers when the damn thing restarted (without warning) and had the addons turned off. This should not happen, default should be to not allow any new addons to be installed not crash the whole damn thing.

Looks like Chromium, Seamonkey (which is in long term freeze it appears), Vivaldi are the other options. Some crazy sh*t this was.

PS: I don't believe the expired cert. line either and the studies fix is BS. Hey, if you want your fix give us your data...wow, really!

PSS: posted from Erics Chromium build.