1183040 - Blocklist wrongly claims many issues affect only Firefox users

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Blocklist Policy Requests, defect)

Description

[Tristan Miller]

The Thunderbird add-on blocklist at <https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/blocked/> contains many entries which claim that insecure plugins affect only "Firefox users who have this add-on installed" (or similar wording).  Examples:

<https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/blocked/p940>

<https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/blocked/p912>

<https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/blocked/i886>

Such claims are dangerously misleading, since these plugins can also be found on systems where SeaMonkey but not Firefox is installed.  SeaMonkey users may wrongly assume that the problems are Firefox-specific, and that they are therefore unaffected.

Please fix the blocklist reports to remove references to Firefox, except where the vulnerabilities are specific to Firefox as opposed to Mozilla browsers in general.  (An example of a correctly worded report is <https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/blocked/i864>, which answers the question "Who is affected?" with "All users who have this add-on installed.")

Comment 1

[Tristan Miller]

The same problem also affects the SeaMonkey blocklist at <https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/blocked/>.

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

The blocks would need to be manually changed, and there are too many to change. I'll try to be more generic for future blocks, but I can't change all of them.