Mozilla has announced a new feature for its Firefox web browser This means that some extensions will be blocked from specific websites.
In the Release Notes For the latest version of Firefox, 115.0, Mozilla stated that the Quarantined Domains tool “allows only some Mozilla-monitored extensions to run on certain websites for various reasons, including security concerns.”
In another blog entry The company went on to explain why some extensions stopped working on certain websites, saying that an open ecosystem of add-ons that’s good for developers could also be good for threat actors. It added that ratings and user reviews are not always enough to find and prevent malicious add-ons.
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“[Quarantined Domains] “Allows us to prevent attacks by malicious actors targeting specific domains when we have reason to believe there may be malicious add-ons that we haven’t discovered yet,” it said.
However, users can disable the new feature if needed by typing “about:config” in the address bar and setting “extensions.quarantinedDomains.enabled” to false. Mozilla also says it will improve this feature over time and expects Firefox 116 to allow users to control behavior for any add-on they have.
The warning about potentially broken add-ons appears in the extensions popup and not in the icon, so such warnings are not displayed in the pinned toolbar when adding extensions.
Jeff Johnson, a researcher and developer of a privacy-focused extension, noted: “The quarantined domain warning also no longer appears in the extension popup. In fact, there is no longer an extensions popup: clicking the icon in the Extensions toolbar simply opens the About :addons page, which doesn’t show the quarantined domains warning anywhere.
“This is a terrible UI design for the new so-called ‘security’ feature that silently disables extensions while hiding the warning from the user,” they added.
The new feature comes shortly after Mozilla commented on a proposed law in France that would block certain websites on a government list. It states: “Such a move will upend decades-established norms for moderation of content and provide authoritarian governments with a playbook that will easily negate the existence of tools to circumvent censorship.”
