Setting to control Accessibility Services taken away?
Before 81.0, Firefox on Windows had a setting in the Privacy & Security section to control whether other apps could use Accessibility Services to hook into Firefox. In version 81, this option appears to have been removed (I can't even seem to find a bullet point in the release notes) and the underlying about:config setting "accessibility.force_disabled" seems to be reverted to the default value of 0. Does anyone know what's going on?
Posted Sep 24, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC
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It sounds like it was being over-zealously disabled due its prominent position on the page (Bug 1613468). As long as there isn't a bright blue icon on the tab bar you are safe. The accessibility services article has been updated with instructions on how to disable it.
That's exactly the info I was looking for, thank you very much!
I definitely agree that it's a setting most users will probably never need to change, but I was very confused that the menu entry for it disappeared without any comment or explanation that I could readily find. I was a little more unhappy that the update also seemed to blow away my existing choice for that by reverting the value to 0 (especially since it also took away the menu item that would've shown me that fact), but after looking over the bugs around this setting and GPO/policy processing in 81 it seems like that may have been an accidental.