Text | Travis
Produced | OSC Open Source Community (ID: oschina2013)
A few days ago, a user posted a post titled "Chinese users cannot use ad blocking extensions" on the Mozilla official forum. In the post, the user stated that when using an IP in mainland China to access ad blocking extension pages in the Firefox extension store (such as uBlock Origin, AdGuard AdBlocker, AdBlock For Firefox, and AdNauseam), the message "This page is not available in your region" is displayed.
After actual testing, when visiting the pages of the four ad blocking extensions mentioned above, the following prompt message does pop up. Users in mainland China cannot install such extensions through the Firefox extension store.
Further analysis shows that when visiting the above page, the website will return an error code of 451, which usually means "unavailable for legal reasons".
In fact, as early as 2017 and 2018, Beijing Mozhi Firefox Information Technology Co., Ltd. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mozilla in China) was sued by many domestic companies for ad blocking. Since the judgment has taken effect in 2019, it is not yet known. It is clear whether the blocking incident is related to the previous legal action. Mozilla has not yet responded to the matter in the official forum.
The currently affected ad blocking extensions are limited to the four mentioned at the beginning. Ad blocking plug-ins like Adblock Plus and Ghostery are not affected for the time being. Other types of extensions are not affected and can be accessed, downloaded and installed normally. .
Since all versions of Firefox share the same addons.mozilla.org page, users are affected by this regardless of whether they are using the domestic version of Firefox or the international version of Firefox.
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