1644214 - Extension Policy doesn't reinstall extension

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Enterprise Policies, defect, P3)

Description

[Zack McCauley]

Attachment: FIrefox AEA Test 2.mobileconfig

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0

Steps to reproduce:

Installed Policy (configuration profile [attached]) via ConfigurationProfile.
Restarted Firefox.
Extension installed no problem.
Removed Policy.
Restarted Firefox.
Extension was left installed.
Removed extension.
Re-installed Policy
Extension setting shows in about:policy but is not reinstalled.

Actual results:

Extension was not removed with Policy and not reinstalled with Policy.

Expected results:

Extension should have removed with Policy and reinstalled with Policy.

Comment 1

[Zack McCauley]

Was also found that there is a line in the users profile (~Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/gctfxded.default-esr/prefs.js)
"user_pref("browser.policies.runOncePerModification.extensionsInstall", "[\"https://browser-plugin.amazon-corp.com/bravehearts/extensions/firefox.xpi\"]”);" that is not removed when the policy is removed off device. It creates a situation that when the policy is reinstalled, that line is still in the users prefs.js and thus it doesn't actually install the extension again.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 3

[Emil Ghitta, QA [:emilghitta]]

I can reproduce this behavior using macOS 10.13 on:

Firefox 79.0b7 (BuildId:20200710175519)
Firefox 78.0.2 (BuildId:20200708170202)
Firefox 78.0.2esr (BuildId:20200708170510)

I would like to get Mike's input on this one.

Comment 4

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply] (PTO until Sept 14)]

The original implementation of the Extensions policies had a lot of problems (as you are seeing).

We created the new ExtensionSettings policy to try to overcome a lot of these:

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md#extensionsettings

So I would recommend using that if you can.

That being said, we should be able to detect the uninstall of the extension and remove it from the runOnce list.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply] (PTO until Sept 14)]

We're not going to fix these as we're recommending people use ExtensionSettings.