1379640 - Spurious notification about externally installed "Flash as Click-to-Activate" addon

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, defect, P4)

Description

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Attachment: screen.png

After updating Nightly and restarting it, I got this notification. I assume it is a system addon and so I shouldn't have seen any notification.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I believe this is: webextPerms.sideloadTextNoPerms=Another program on your computer installed an add-on that may affect your browser. Please choose to Enable or Cancel (to leave it disabled).

Definitely should not be seeing this for a system addon!

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: If this affects beta, it's a big deal which could significantly harm rollout.

Comment 2

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

This is not the first time we see a report like this, right? I recall something similar like 1 or 2 months ago..
The sideloaded warning showed up for a system add-on

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I have a vague memory of this but I don't remember the details.

Comment 4

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

A similar thing happened for telemetry experiments, that was bug 1367823 which was specific to the code that manages experiments.
In my Nightly I don't see a system add-on named "Flash as Click-to-Activate" though.  I do see "Click-to-Play staged rollout".  Sorry for the dumb question but do you actually have a sideloaded addon on your system named "Flash as Click-to-Activate"?

Comment 5

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

After seeing the prompt, I could see the addon in the "Experiments" section of the about:addons page. It was disabled (maybe because I hadn't accepted the prompt).

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Oh, this was a very old experiment:

Start Date
    13-Apr-2017
End Date
    23-Apr-2017
Maximum runtime
    10.0 days
Update Channels
    nightly
Firefox version(s)
    55.0a1 
Build ID
    20170331030216 - 
Sample Rate
    25% 

Although we still shouldn't be seeing this prompt ever for experiment addons, which have type=128.

Comment 7

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Yuck, this could be fallout from the part of bug 1358907 that defers removing old experiments until after startup (for obvious reasons).  We can add additional special-casing of telemetry experiments to the pile of it that we already have through the addons manager.  However, now that we have shield, when can we just kill telemetry experiments?

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Andy and I had an email thread about that earlier. While eventually we'll probably remove telex, opt-out shield studies aren't reliable enough to remove the old system yet, so we're keeping them both for a while yet.

Comment 9

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

This can be fixed by adding an `if (addon.type != "experiment")` clause somewhere like here:
http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/b7e531410ebc1c7d74a78e86a894e69608db318c/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/internal/XPIProvider.jsm#1607

or here:

http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/b7e531410ebc1c7d74a78e86a894e69608db318c/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/internal/XPIProvider.jsm#3242-3243

Its a trivial change but I don't understand enough about telemetry experiments to know how to trigger that behavior to test the change.  Updating the component so that somebody who does can write a patch that includes a proper test.

Comment 10

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

We can remove Telemetry Experiments soon in bug 1415284 et al.
That would obsolete this bug.

Comment 11

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Telemetry experiments were removed.