Windows 7: Mozilla blocks McAfee Firefox extension, citing "explosive crashes"

Summary: Mozilla’s new rapid-release schedule for Firefox is playing havoc with security software companies. A McAfee add-on has been blocked because of crashes with recent Firefox releases, and Norton has had to issue multiple compatibility updates.

Mozilla has taken the rare step of blacklisting a McAfee extension for the Firefox browser.

The Firefox add-ons page for McAfee ScriptScan displays a large red X and notes that the add-on “causes a high volume of crashes.”

Mozilla’s advisory says, “Users are strongly encouraged to disable the problematic add-on or plugin, but may choose to continue using it if they accept the risks described.”

The bug report for the issue goes into greater detail. The report is titled “Blocklist McAfee ScriptScan for Firefox and McAfee SiteAdvisor due to explosive crashes,” and it notes that two separate bugs highly correlated with the two add-ons caused 3,432 and 6,691 crashes in the week ending September 28. The issues reportedly affect users of Firefox 6.0.2 and the just-released Firefox 7.

A comment in the bug report, dated September 28, suggests that the problem is even worse than those numbers would suggest:

We had 1555 processed crashes on 6.* yesterday, with the 10% throttling rate, this means that roughly 15,000 crashes happened during a single day with this signature!