This is another great feature coming soon to Firefox. Mozilla has announced to disable all third party bundled add-ons by default. Users are required to enable such add-ons manually in order to use these add-ons.

Several software and third party programs automatically install their Firefox extensions without user’s consent during their own installation process. Most of such applications even don’t prompt users to opt-out of this. These add-ons may slow down Firefox, cause incompatibility for other add-ons, introduce unwanted features and sometimes may be malicious or track user’s browsing.

Although, Mozilla has a dedicated team for reviewing Firefox add-ons before they go public on official add-on gallery for performance, compatibility and privacy issues. But, as these add-ons are not hosted on Mozilla’s official add-on gallery, hence Mozilla can’t control them directly. A recent example of such bundled add-on is Skype Toolbar for Firefox. Mozilla had to block it as it was causing browser crashes and slows down certain processes by up to 300 times.

New Control Features

To avoid above issues, Mozilla is going to introduce a new feature in Firefox. All third party add-ons will be disabled by default, and require user’s manual approval for working.

Mozilla’s Product Manager for Add-ons, Justin Scott, explains this as, "If Firefox starts and finds that another program has installed an add-on, Firefox will disable the add-on until the user has explicitly opted in to the addition. Users that want the functionality provided by a third-party-installed add-on can easily allow the installation, while users who don’t can cancel or ignore the prompt."  This feature will land in Firefox Aurora channel by the next week.

Also read: Firefox Team Working On 100 New Features!