From Firefox 42, add-on signing gets pushed to Firefox 46

Jan 24, 2016 13:32 GMT  ·  By

The Mozilla team has announced, yet again, that it will be delaying the implementation of mandatory add-on signing in Firefox.

Add-on signing is the process through which Mozilla reviews each add-on and gives it its official seal of approval.

According to the new timeline, starting with Firefox 46, users won't be able to use unsigned add-ons anymore.

Mozilla devs introduced this "feature" in Firefox 41 as an optional setting and was set to become live with Firefox 42.

With every new version of Firefox, the feature got pushed back, and in Firefox 43, it became semi-official when add-on signing started being enforced.

Currently, by tweaking an option in the about:config Firefox settings page, users can still disable this feature and install unsigned add-ons.

The Firefox team planned to remove this workaround with Firefox 44 and prevent users from installing unsigned add-ons altogether.

New add-on signing deadline: Firefox 46

This decision has now been pushed back to Firefox 46, proving once again that add-on signing, despite its security benefits, is a terrible idea.

This is because some users might feel alienated when they have to give up on using their favorite add-ons, which, despite being abandoned by their developers, continue to work just fine.

Mozilla devs justified this delay giving two reasons:

1) "We’re adding a feature in Firefox 45 that allows temporarily loading unsigned restartless add-ons in release, which will allow developers of those add-ons to use Firefox for testing, and we’d like this option to be available when we remove the preference."

2) "We also want to ensure that developers have adequate time to finish the transition to signed add-ons."

Recently, Mozilla has been trying to give Firefox a complete facelift, something of which most users weren't that supportive. If Mozilla screws up in any way the add-on signing process, we might see hoards of Firefox users migrate to Chrome or alternative Firefox projects like Pale Moon.