1407087 - Warn in about:debugging on match pattern failure

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1446450

(WebExtensions :: Developer Tools, defect, P5)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Attachment: manifest.json

Nightly 58 on OS X.

Create a folder foo with the following files:
  manifest.json
  foo.js
The manifest.json file is attached; foo.js is an empty file. Go to about:debugging#addons and click the button to load a temporary add-on, and select the manifest.json.

Actual results:
Error message shows up "There was an error during installation: Extension is invalid" with a retry button

Expected results:
A more useful error message.

After some bisecting I discovered the problem is that the "matches" property in my content_scripts is "*". If I change it to something like "https://foo.com/*" then the addon is loaded successfully. However this restriction is not clear either from the error message or from the MDN docs at [1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/content_scripts#Matching_URL_patterns

Comment 1

[Andy McKay]

The browser log is:

1507680282231	addons.webextension.<unknown>	ERROR	Loading extension 'null': Reading manifest: Error processing content_scripts.0.matches.0: Value "*" must either: be one of ["<all_urls>"], match the pattern /^(https?|wss?|file|ftp|\*):\/\/(\*|\*\.[^*/]+|[^*/]+)\/.*$/, or match the pattern /^file:\/\/\/.*$/

Let's see if we can surface that up to about:debugging. Noting that web-ext lint does warn about this.

Also we could put a message like: "Having trouble loading the add-on? Try opening the browser console or running web-ext lint."

Comment 2

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

The schema validation errors detected when installing an extension temporarily from about:debugging should all be visible in about:debugging (fixed in Firefox 67 by Bug 1446450).