4 ms·

> In theory, fixing a problem like this looks simple: make a new, valid certificate and republish every add-on with that certificate. Unfortunately, [..] I'd e

by Faark 7y ago

> In theory, fixing a problem like this looks simple: make a new, valid certificate and republish every add-on with that certificate. Unfortunately, [..] I'd expect addon usage to follow a pareto distribution. Thus resigning the most important ones would have helped a lot of users. Why didn't they start going this route anyway? Not enough manpower for this to not diverted resources from the other more important fixes?

callahad 7y ago
I expect the full postmortem will dive into this in more detail, but one reason mentioned in ekr's post is that many add-ons are distributed independently, outside of AMO. So while we could re-sign those, we're not in a place to re-distribute them. Instead, "users would have to manually update any add-ons that they had installed from other sources, which would be very inconvenient."
sciurus 7y ago
I think this is covered in the blog post, but I'll take another stab at explaining it from my perspective: Republishing was one of the options we were investigating early on. However, the problem is that it only fixes things once you check for and install the updated version signed with the new certificate. Firefox would still have disabled your installed version that had an expired certificate. Firefox checks for addon updates every 24 hours, but it checks in with Normandy every 6 hours. Thus once we had stopgap fixes shipping to users via Normandy, and a proper fix of a new Firefox release in progress, republishing addons wasn't necessary. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
- Faark 7y ago
  Thanks for your response. An update being deactivated doesn't trigger an update check for said addon? Well, complexity of a graceful update attempt for a not loadable addon probably outweighs the benefit of such rare cases. But the main reason I had a hard time with you guys discarding this path is probably addon stats like [0]. The spike in downloads made me think it could have helped at least some users. But on second thought, it might also have been caused by extensions getting re-enabled post fix. 2m downloads at 4m DAU makes me guess this was caused by something automatic. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/statistics/?last=30 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
  - sciurus 7y ago
    This is a good point; I'll try to make sure it's raised when we conduct our postmortem. (Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

by Faark 7y ago

callahad 7y ago

I expect the full postmortem will dive into this in more detail, but one reason mentioned in ekr's post is that many add-ons are distributed independently, outside of AMO. So while we could re-sign those, we're not in a place to re-distribute them. Instead, "users would have to manually update any add-ons that they had installed from other sources, which would be very inconvenient."

sciurus 7y ago

I think this is covered in the blog post, but I'll take another stab at explaining it from my perspective: Republishing was one of the options we were investigating early on. However, the problem is that it only fixes things once you check for and install the updated version signed with the new certificate. Firefox would still have disabled your installed version that had an expired certificate. Firefox checks for addon updates every 24 hours, but it checks in with Normandy every 6 hours. Thus once we had stopgap fixes shipping to users via Normandy, and a proper fix of a new Firefox release in progress, republishing addons wasn't necessary. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)

Faark 7y ago
Thanks for your response. An update being deactivated doesn't trigger an update check for said addon? Well, complexity of a graceful update attempt for a not loadable addon probably outweighs the benefit of such rare cases. But the main reason I had a hard time with you guys discarding this path is probably addon stats like [0]. The spike in downloads made me think it could have helped at least some users. But on second thought, it might also have been caused by extensions getting re-enabled post fix. 2m downloads at 4m DAU makes me guess this was caused by something automatic. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/statistics/?last=30 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
- sciurus 7y ago
  This is a good point; I'll try to make sure it's raised when we conduct our postmortem. (Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)