1160057 - Add a Preference to Disable installation of WebApps

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Web Apps, defect)

Description

[Eduard Göbl]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20150417180241

Steps to reproduce:

At the moment, there is no possibility to disable the installation of WebApps. For instance, the installation of Extensions can be disabled by locking the preference xpinstall.enabled to false. There should be an equivalent preference for enabling or disabling the installation of WebApps.

The only solution I managed to figure out so far is to set the ownership of the webapps directory in the specific Firefox profile to root. Nevertheless, this is not very satisfying since this solution is not very informative for the user. There should be a warning comparable to xpinstallDisabledMessageLocked: "Software installation has been disabled by your system administrator."

Comment 1

[Ignaz Forster]

Another way to prevent installation of Apps would be to set
	lockPref("dom.mozApps.signed_apps_installable_from", "");
That way it isn't allowed to install Apps from any server, resulting in an error popup after download.

Unfortunately in both this and Eduard Göbl's solution the user will be notified only *after* he initiated all steps to download and install an app that it wasn't possible to actually install it - it would have been better if the user hadn't been able to try installing it in the first place. Apart from that every failed installation leaves artifacts in the user's home, e.g. on Linux the directory ~/.2048-e8ec873ccb4fa5d957f40330a92ae1fa was created with a profiles.ini, a profile directory and a file called times.json therein when I just tried to install 2048.

Generally if such a feature can't be turned off that makes it difficult to deploy Firefox in an enterprise environment (though fortunately the above solutions work)...

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per bug 1238079, we're going to disable the desktop web runtime and remove it
from the codebase, so we won't fix these bugs in the integration between Firefox and the runtime.