Today in the middle of watching a YouTube video (i.e., software already running) suddenly Firefox disabled all of my extensions, most of which were very popular, such as Adblock Plus and NoScript. I took to IRC to ask about it, and discovered it was not an isolated incident. It's happening to thousands, maybe millions, maybe most or all users.

Given that Mozilla sold out long ago to snowflakes and started firing developers for political ideas they didn't agree with it's not really a surprise that it's going downhill. I wonder if this is the nail in the coffin.

The moderators decided to shut down communication on the #firefox channels because they didn't like what their users had to say about it. Unfortunately, there really isn't a good option for a different browser. Maybe Chromium...

To be precise, Mozilla "released" a fix, but the fix is only distributed through their "studies" feature which relies on sharing data with Mozilla about your usage and behaviors. I.e., You must let them spy on you to receive the fix currently. The workaround appears to be disabling certificate checking, which is generally not a good idea. The certificate system was put in place for a reason.

The power user community is still pretty pissed off about this. Instead of releasing the certificate in a way that allows users who respect their freedom and privacy to access it they've hidden it behind this "studies" functionality, which honestly I had no idea was even a thing until now, but somehow it is disabled (perhaps I have Debian to thank for that).

The dissenters in the community have been linking to https://paste.debian.net/1081496/.

On a side note: the chatter in #firefox gave me this very interesting discovery: https://pi-hole.net/

HA! And just a day ago I received an email from Mozilla about privacy and our right to our information and that they were going to do something about Big Boys spying us.

There is a temporary fix and they are working again. They plan a larger patch to fix the issue.

This was the first time I ever actually viewed Youtube without my ad-blocker and I had to admit, it was more annoying than I ever imagined! Facebook on the otherhand wasn't too bad with their ads. I didn't find it annoying at all and could honestly live with them. In any event, it was SO nice to have that back working again. I never realized how much I loved that until I lost it.

Plus I have a few others I have grown used to which I could live without.

My main complaint about all of this was the idea that they would arbitrarily just shut down my add-ons without my permission and not even provide a method where I could override such behaviour. I hope they address this issue in the future, I would at least like an advanced option to allow addons anyhow with perhaps a large "WARNING: YOUR COMPUTER MAY EXPLODE IF YOU USE THEM! ARE YOU SURE?!" warning... but still allow them to be used at my own risk.

I ended up using Chrome for a day which wasn't too bad, but I still can't see me using it over Firefox, I simply like Firefox too much. It's nice to have Chrome as an emergency backup and I now have it looking similar to Firefox with my bookmarks, so at least it is up to date for a while.

Oh, kewl, I just checked and that is what I have now. Nice. I didn't want to switch away from Firefox. I hope this is a lesson that won't be lost on future development and prevention of problems like this happening again.

Ubuntu finally updated to 66.0.4 as well now. I refused to enable studies so I had extension signing checks disabled until now