1790997 - Document the 2022 procedure for deploying an enterprise extension

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Graham Leggett]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.6.1 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Identity an authoritative Firefox/Mozilla document that describes the system wide installation of an extension in a Firefox browser in 2022.

Actual results:

According to https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribute-sideloading/#standard-extension-folders, a site that does not appear to be affiliated with Firefox by name but that carries Firefox branding, it is possible to sideload an extension by naming the extension a given name and placing the extension in a given directory. This does not work in Firefox 91 or 104.

According to https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/31/firefox-to-discontinue-sideloaded-extensions/, sideloading of extensions was "changed". The body of the blog entry claims that sideloading extensions will be "discontinued".

A default install of Firefox 104 on a Raspberry Pi shows the following sideloaded extensions preinstalled:

Add-ons Search Detection extension 2.0.0 true [e-mail]
Amazon.co.uk extension 1.9 true [e-mail]
Amazon.com extension 1.3 true [e-mail]
Bing extension 1.3 true [e-mail]
DuckDuckGo extension 1.1 true [e-mail]
eBay extension 1.3 true [e-mail]
Google extension 1.2 true [e-mail]
Wikipedia (en) extension 1.1 true [e-mail]
English (US) Language Pack locale 104.0.2buildid20220902.153754 true [e-mail]

From the above list sideloading is obviously possible, but the process is undocumented.

Expected results:

We need an accurate description of how to sideload an extension in a Firefox browser in 2022.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'WebExtensions::Untriaged' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Alex Cornestean]

Hello,

After reading through the report, what you are proposing is an enhancement and not a defect.

As such I will mark it accordingly. Thank you !

Comment 3

[Graham Leggett]

I'm aware that many project managers are quite happy to consider something "done" without any documentation whatsoever, this doesn't justify making this an enhancement.

Comment 4

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

The extensions you have listed are builtin addons distributed inside of firefox. They are not sideloaded.

The extensionworkshop page you linked to is the authoritative documentation. If there is a problem with the instructions or they do not work, please post steps to reproduce and where the process does not work.