After the collapse of the Mozilla Firefox browser add-ons system last weekend, the company announced its commitment to improve resource tracking and create a way to push updates quickly when needed.
In a blog post , Mozilla detailed some initial plans and revealed that next week a list of all unexpected changes in the browser will be published. In this regard, “Eric Rescorla”, Firefox’s Chief Technology Officer, explained that the error in the browser’s add-on functions was due to the expiration of the certificate used to sign these add-on functions, resulting in most of these add-ons being disabled.
“Eric Rescorla” said that the company noticed the problem on Friday afternoon, however, its security team noticed that not all users experienced add-on failures, as they were verified every 24 hours, and the time varied for each user.
Apparently, when Firefox began verifying the installed add-ons for each user, the certificate signing the add-ons expired, leading to disabling all add-ons sent to the mentioned signature, which theoretically were the majority. When users complained that Mozilla took a long time to resolve the issue, “Eric Rescorla” responded that the team responded in less than 9 hours, and the solution reached all affected users within 12 hours at most after the incident. For the CTO, this is very positive.
“Eric Rescorla” acknowledged that the solution did not reach all users, including those using previous versions of Firefox. In the case of these people, the company recommends updating to the latest version of the web browser, not only to receive the solution, but because it is a more secure version.
