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Mozilla ends Promoted Firefox Add-ons Program Mozilla Add-ons Product Manager Jorge Villalobos announced the end of Mozilla's Promoted Add-ons pilot for the Firefox web browser on January 21, 2021. The organization decided not to move forward and make the program a permanent feature of the browser's add-ons ecosystem. After reviewing the pilot results, we have decided not to move forward with this iteration of the program. Mozilla introduced the program in September 2020 as a pilot program called Promoted Add-ons. The main idea was to provide developers with

Abusive add-ons aren’t just a Chrome and Firefox problem. Now it’s Edge’s turn Edge users take to social media to report their Web searches are being hijacked. Enlarge Microsoft 55 with 44 posters participating For years, Google and Mozilla have battled to keep abusive or outright malicious browser extensions from infiltrating their official repositories. Now, Microsoft is taking up the fight. Over the past several days, people in website forums have complained of the Google searches being

Mozilla adds two new badges to help identify trusted add-ons Mozilla has launched two new badges for add-ons to help users find extensions made by and extensions verified by Mozilla. Aside from being displayed on the Mozilla add-ons website, extensions on the browser’s add-on menu will also carry one of the new badges if they’ve been awarded. The green verified badge is awarded to extensions that have successfully completed a review process by Mozilla to ensure that it is trusted. End users that see the badge can be assured that the add-on is regul

Mozilla Add-ons developers may soon pay Mozilla for reviews and promoted listings Mozilla announced the introduction of the "Promoted Add-ons Pilot" program on September 9, 2020 on the official Add-ons blog. The pilot program will run between September and November 2020, and may be turned into a full service for developers of Firefox add-ons afterwards. The main idea behind the new service is to provide add-on developers and companies with options to have their add-ons manually reviewed by Mozilla and as a consequence, promoted on the Mozilla website.

A wave of malware add-ons hit the Mozilla Firefox Extensions Store If you browse the official Mozilla store for Firefox extensions, called Mozilla AMO, you may stumble upon extensions that have names of popular software products or extensions. Extensions like Adobe Flash Player or ublock Origin Pro are listed in the Mozilla AMO store currently. These have no users at the time of writing as they are brand new and they appear to have been created and uploaded by random users (Firefox user xyz). The extensions have no description and t

Here is why the user count dropped for nearly all Firefox add-ons If you have been to Mozilla AMO recently, the main and official repository for Firefox add-ons and themes, you may have noticed that the "users" count of extensions that you checked out there has dropped. Take the popular content blocker uBlock Origin for example. The extension's current count is 3.94 million users according to Mozilla AMO; some days ago, the count was 5.5 million users. Mozilla published a blog post on the official Mozilla Add-ons blog that highlights why there is a drop across the boar

Thunderbird add-on developer launches Kickstarter campaign to ensure continued compatibility The extension system of the Thunderbird email client is changing. The email client is based on Firefox code to a large degree and since Mozilla changed the extension system to WebExtensions, it was only a matter of time before Thunderbird's extension system would be switched over as well. The process started with the release of Thunderbird 68. Extension developers had to update their extensions so that users could continue to use them in the new version of the email client. Som

A team of Belgian researchers discovered privacy issues in how browsers, ad-blocking, and anti-tracking implementations handle third-party cookie requests. A team of Belgian researchers from KU Leuven analyzed third-party cookie policies of seven major web browsers, 31 ad-blockers and 14 anti-tracking extensions and discovered major and minor issues in all of them. Major issues include Microsoft Edge's unwillingness to honor its own "block only third-party cookies" setting, bypasses for Firefox's Tracking Protection feature, and use of the integrated PDF viewer in Chrome

Mozilla removed today 23 Firefox add-ons that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer has told Bleeping Computer today. The list of blocked add-ons includes "Web Security," a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, which was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users' browsing histories to a server located in Germany. Mozilla follows through on the promised investigation "The mentioned add-on has been taken down, together with others after I conducted a thorough audit of [the] add-ons," Rob Wu, a Mozill