Firefox add-ons "more difficult" to hijack than Chrome

  • 23 January 2014
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Firefox add-ons "more difficult" to hijack than Chrome

By Shona Ghosh
Posted on 21 Jan 2014 at 10:34
 
Mozilla has claimed it's difficult to hijack Firefox browser add-ons to serve  ads, after Google was forced to pull two Chrome extensions that began spamming  users.
 
Google removed the "Add to Feedly" and "Tweet this Page"  extensions from the Chrome web store this week, after they were bought by third  parties and quietly updated to inject ads into web pages.
But Mozilla said it was more difficult to introduce silent updates for  Firefox add-ons than it appears to be for Chrome extensions.
 
"For add-ons hosted on addons.mozilla.org, all version updates are code  reviewed and tested by a member of our review team, and it needs to pass all of  our review policies to be pushed to users via auto-update," a Mozilla  spokesperson said. "One such policy is that all unexpected changes, such as  advertising, needs to be explicitly opt-in."
 
"This all makes it more difficult for this kind of hijacking to be effective  for add-ons listed on Mozilla Add-ons," she added.
The issue has reportedly affected Firefox, however. An investigation by tech site Ghacks found at least one extension,  AutoCopy, had been bought by a company called Wips, which then introduced ads  through an update - slipping past Mozilla's review processes.
 
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