Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Featured extension, but download says author not verified

more options

Can I safely download an extension when I get an alert saying the author is not verified? I found this for NoSquint, Auto Pager, Print Edit, and even Adblock Plus (probably the most downloaded extension there is). Pretty frustrating for Firefox to "feature" an extension that is not safe to download.

Can I safely download an extension when I get an alert saying the author is not verified? I found this for NoSquint, Auto Pager, Print Edit, and even Adblock Plus (probably the most downloaded extension there is). Pretty frustrating for Firefox to "feature" an extension that is not safe to download.

Modified by Harry27

All Replies (2)

more options

These are some of the most popular add-ons that there are for Firefox. Assuming you are using the official mozilla site then they will be safe.

Not sure why that happens, I have seen similar myself; maybe someone will enlighten us ?

more options

I have never seen an extension which was "verified". As I recall, that message was added to Firefox 2.0, back in Oct 2006, maybe even Firefox 1.5 in Nov 2005. I vaguely recall some discussion of that new "feature" taking place in the MozillaZine Builds forum, about it not being complete - the "author verification" parameters needed more work before it was completed.

My best guess is that the person behind that feature is no longer with Mozilla development (lost some good people to Google in '06 & '07, who may have ended up creating Chrome), and no one stepped forward to "take ownership" of that module.

That said, the Addons website has been completely rebuilt at least twice since that days of 1.5 / 2.0, with many minor changes and improvements, too. IMO, feature isn't really as necessary as it was in those days. There is an extensive, multi-stage screening done as part of the upload process; nothing is even allowed on the AMO servers without passing the "screening" process. Then all new extensions get a preliminary code review before they are made "public". Then there is some type of "sandbox" warning for new extensions showing at AMO until they reach a certain number or level of downloads - that I am not familiar with that, I haven't kept up with the changes over that last few years. IMO, they're fixing stuff that was working and confusing their users in the process.

But Addons obtained elsewhere, would benefit from "author verification", so the user needs to be careful with those non-AMO hosted Addons.