1555572 - "Signing and distributing your add-on" article - themes and language packs do need to be signed

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, defect)

Description

[lamaar9]

Attachment: Dark-Animated-Sakura-Firefox.zip

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

I decided to create my own version for personal use of an existing theme, modified to be a dark theme. After finishing debugging it, I click-and-dragged the attached zip (compressed with 7zip) to the about:addons themes page. When that failed, I clicked the cog icon, selected 'Install add-on from file', and selected the same zip file, which also failed

Actual results:

In both instances firefox produced a notice that 'This add-on could not be installed because it has not been verified'

Expected results:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/theme states that any manifest that contains a theme key is assumed to be a theme
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Distribution states that themes do not need to be signed to be installed
Based on these sources I believe my theme should be recognized as such and not require signing to install

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

N.B.: I don't know why, but the Product: dropdown menu here doesn't show Developer Documentation anymore, so I can't triage this where it needs to go. I moved it to developer.mozilla.org :: Wiki pages hoping someone there can place it where it belongs.

The bug is the in the outdated documentation, not the browser. Themes do need to be signed, as seen in bug 1545109 which was fixed a little over a week ago. I believe this is the result of lightweight themes being discontinued in favor of webextension themes.

The article also mentions other types of add-ons don't need to be signed. While this is true for dictionaries, language packs do need to be signed by default. This requirement can be disabled via the extensions.langpacks.signatures.required preference.

Comment 2

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

I've had a go at fixing this:

• Updated the notes at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/theme to contain correct information.
• Updated https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Distribution to correctly state what types of add-on need to be signed.

I hope this looks OK.

For future reference, we now triage content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues. File them there in future.