Mozilla has introduced that some add-ons could also be blocked from working on sure websites as a part of a brand new characteristic referred to as Quarantined Domains.
“We’ve launched a brand new back-end characteristic to solely permit some extensions monitored by Mozilla to run on particular web sites for numerous causes, together with safety considerations,” the corporate stated in its Launch Notes for Firefox 115.0 launched final week.
The corporate stated the openness afforded by the add-on ecosystem might be exploited by malicious actors to their benefit.
“This characteristic permits us to forestall assaults by malicious actors focusing on particular domains when we’ve motive to consider there could also be malicious add-ons we’ve not but found,” Mozilla stated in a separate assist doc.
Customers are anticipated to have extra management over the setting for every add-on, beginning with Firefox model 116. That stated, it may be disabled by loading “about:config” within the deal with bar and setting “extensions.quarantinedDomains.enabled” to false.
The event provides to Mozilla’s present functionality to remotely disable particular person extensions that pose a danger to person privateness and safety.
It is value noting that the warning seems within the Extensions popup somewhat than on the Extensions icon within the present implementation, on account of which the alerts will not be displayed ought to an add-on be pinned to the toolbar.
“It seems that whenever you pin an extension to the toolbar, it now not seems within the Extensions popup!,” safety researcher and add-on developer Jeff Johnson famous.
“Consequently, the quarantined domains warning now not seems within the Extensions popup both. Actually, there is not any longer an Extensions popup: clicking the Extensions toolbar icon merely opens the about:addons web page, which does not present the quarantined domains warning anyplace.”
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“This can be a horrible person interface design for the brand new so-called ‘safety’ characteristic, silently disabling extensions whereas hiding the warning from the person,” Johnson added.
Mozilla has stated that it intends to enhance the person expertise in future releases, though it didn’t give a definitive timeline.
The change additionally comes as Mozilla decried a browser-based web site blocking proposal put forth by France that will require browser distributors to determine mechanisms to mandatorily block web sites current on a government-provided listing to sort out on-line fraud.
“Such a transfer will overturn a long time of established content material moderation norms and supply a playbook for authoritarian governments that may simply negate the existence of censorship circumvention instruments,” the corporate stated.
