Mozilla over the weekend scrambled to come up with a fix for a bug that crippled most Firefox add-ons.

Engineers issued an update for the desktop browser Sunday afternoon that addressed the issue. That update followed a Saturday hotfix released via a little-known component that lets Mozilla feed pre-release code to Firefox users and then collect data from the browser.

[ Further reading: 14 must-have Firefox add-ons ]

The problem was traced to the certificate used by Mozilla to digitally sign Firefox extensions. When the organization neglected to renew the certificate, Firefox assumed the add-ons could not be trusted – that they were, in other words, illegitimate at best, potentially malicious at worst – and then disabled any already installed. Add-ons could not be added to the browser for the same reason.

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