1448805 - Require at least one non-whitespace character in extension names

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: General, defect)

Description

[CosminB]

Attachment: NameBug.png

[Affected versions]:
- Firefox 61.0a1 (20180325220121)
- Firefox 60.0b6 (20180322152034)
- Firefox 59.0.1 (20180315233128

[Affected platforms]:
- Win 7 64-bit
- Mac OS X 10.13.2

[Steps to reproduce]:
1.Install https://addons.allizom.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-name-in-manifest/ 
2.Open Add-ons Manager.
3.Navigate to “Extensions” tab.
4.Observe that the name of the extensions is empty.

[Expected results]:
- The expected result has been presented in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1438149#c5.

[Actual results]:
- The name field is empty.

Notes:
The discussion about this bug was in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1438149

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

This was requested by Markus in the comment referenced above.  We should check the webextensions that have already been signed by AMO to see if there are any that will be affected before implementing this though.

Comment 2

[CosminB]

Linking  bug that I have filed for the AMO side https://github.com/mozilla/addons-linter/issues/1933

Comment 3

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Upon further discussion, we decided this would be simpler to address purely on the AMO side (via the github issue linked above).

In short, we can pretty easily validate the immediate contents of the manifest file, but an extension name is localized, which means its possible values are spread across a bunch of different files (one per locale).  The linter can look through and validate all of these, which is a prerequisite for having an extension signed by AMO.  But it would be a lot of unnecessary work for Firefox to do at install time.

This means that temporarily installed or unsigned extensions (on nightly or dev edition with the preference flipped) can have empty names, but in the normal case of signed extensions, empty names will not be allowed.