14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Firefox 74, which was released earlier this month, dropped support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in an attempt to encourage the transition to more secure systems, but now the parent company is reversing its decision.
TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are both supported even by the latest version of Firefox, as Mozilla wants to support the fight against the new coronavirus.
The reason is as simple as it could be: some sites that didn’t make the switch to TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 for secure connections would no longer work after Firefox is updated to version 74. And given that many government websites supposed to provide information on the coronavirus outbreak are still using the old TLS version, bringing back the feature was the right way to go.
“We reverted the change for an undetermined amount of time to better enable access to critical government sites sharing COVID19 information,” Mozilla explains in the official release notes of the latest Firefox version.
Old TLS restored in Firefox beta too
Furthermore, as Ghacks notes, Mozilla explains that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 is enabled only temporarily, which means that at some point in the future, it is expected to be disabled once again, most likely after the coronavirus outbreak is over.
The latest Firefox beta version also restores the old TLS version support.
“Mozilla is going to temporarily re-enable the TLS 1.0/1.1 support in Firefox 74 and 75 Beta. The preference change will be remotely applied to Firefox 74, which has already been shipped. This is because many people are currently forced to work at home and relying on online tools amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, but some of critical government sites still don’t support TLS 1.2 yet,” Mozilla says.
The change concerns all versions of Firefox regardless of the desktop platform you’re using.