Firefox disabled all my .NET addons

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I started up Firefox this morning, and it popped up the following (not so) helpful dialog:

Now, I don't mind blocking addons if they actually cause problems, but this dialog isn't very helpful at indicating why it was blocked. If you click on the "More information" link, it takes you here, which in turn takes you here.

From looking at that bug list, it seems that they blocked the plugin because of a WPF vulnerability which a) wasn't even related to Firefox and b) is now fixed anyway.

Now, I've said before that I'm no consipracy theorist, but if this had been the other way around (Microsoft blocking a Mozilla extension) then the internet would've exploded with complaints by now. All I can see are a bunch of people on that buglist complaining, and not much else.

It seems to me that the people who decided to block the extensions were simply being a bit overzealous with their "block-hammer" and banned it too quickly - without fully researching the problem. After all, it seems it was blocked after reading some technet blog post which recommended individuals disable the plugin if they are affected. There's a big difference between an individual disabling a plugin (or a company disabling it company-wide) and Mozilla blocking the plugin for everybody. Especially since there's doesn't seem to be any way to "unblock" it that doesn't involve disabling the blocklist entirely (which is, in general, a good feature and doesn't need to be disabled completely!)

I guess in the end it all comes down to the fact that everybody makes mistakes. It was a mistake to block these plugins, and it looks like they're working to fix it (though the comments on that bug don't seem to inspire much confidence that it's a high priority - the first bug went from reported to blocked in about 10 hours whereas the bug to unblock has been open for over a day without getting off "NEW").

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