On the flip side, they can be nasty little critters that install malware, like the 28 add-ons for Facebook, Vimeo, Instagram and others that researchers found in commonly used browsers from Google and Microsoft last year. The add-ons were misusing the proxy API, which APIs use to control how Firefox connects to the internet.Īdd-ons are powerful snippets of software that can be added to Firefox or other apps to customize the browser by doing things like preventing tracking, blocking ads, downloading videos from websites or providing content translation. In a Monday post, Mozilla’s development team members Rachel Tublitz and Stuart Colville said that they’d discovered the misbehaving add-ons in early June. Mozilla’s Firefox team has blocked add-ons that were abusing the proxy API in order to prevent around 455,000 users from updating their browsers.
