https://betanews.com/2025/03/10/firefox-addons-breaking-update-now/so, I had to learn to hack my browser to reenable addons, all was well but advanced cookie manager was causing firefox 51 to drop all my other addons. I eventually hacked them all back in successfully, but then.. some sort of timer expired and disabled my addons. in the end I toasted aushelper (as it's the primary addon shipped with ff and built in and needs to be hacked to disable it) so now there shouldn't be any update checking functionality. I also removed all the update urls in
about:config.at first doing that broke all my addons, I had to remove them individually add them in temp, then hack them in permanently and changed the extension update interval to as high a number as it will go then disabled all updating in about config as well. even so I expect it to break again, just maybe half a year later instead of daily or every 2 days.
I'm hessitant to try to hack advanced cookie manager in again, I do have ccleaner as a backup, but that only allows cookie deletion while the browser is closed, where advanced cookie manager allowed full cookie manipulation while the browser is active. As it took some major messing about with hacking and backup files to get the main functional addons (a good adblocker with an options page that actually works and is visible, noscript, and downthemall download manager) in place again, I'd rather not attempt to hack in an addon that requires a browser restart right now and risk it bumping all my addons.
at this point I'm almost tempted to go find the sourcecode for ff51 and modify out all it's addon restrictions and just put in a confirmation window and password to install addons as a security measure..
I'm strongly considering palemoon atm as that will be easier as I wont need to do anything other than install a browser. I'm only a hero if I have to be, redoing sourcecode? I'd rather not, I have enough projects this addon disabling issue is already effecting (I'm spending time hacking my browser and fighting mozilla's new attack on legacy addons instead of working on projects). Worst part is the disabling seems to happen every few days in the evening time. I honestly hope adjusting the timer helped.
software built like this is the epitome of poorly designed. everything relies on connections to some server and opinions of the devs rather than user preference.
oh well, if anyone has any info to help this addon protection process let me know.
