1817287 - browser.runtime.onInstalled event not fired when disabled add-on is re-enabled, and menus.create registration disappeared

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, defect, P2)

Description

[mb]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0

Steps to reproduce:

When you place menu creation in a runtime.onInstalled listner using menus.create , as recommended by the docs, it works as expected initially.

However, if you disable and re-enable the extension, the item disappears from the context menu.

Here is the sample code:

browser.runtime.onInstalled.addListener(() => {
  browser.menus.create({
    id: "someId",
    title: "Some title",
    contexts: ["image"],
  });
});

Actual results:

Menu item disappears from the context menu.

Expected results:

The menu item should continue to appear in the context menu after the extension is disabled and re-enabled.

Comment 1

[Alex Cornestean]

Hello mb,

Would you mind attaching a test extension?

I’m from Webextensions QA and I did try to build an extension using the example code you provided, but for some reason I could not get the extension to show the menu item in the context menu.

Thank you !

Comment 2

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Attachment: menus-create-at-onInstalled.zip

Confirmed.

STR:

1. Load attached extension at about:debugging (or: rename .zip to .xpi, set xpinstall.signatures.required to false (Nightly only - not release!) and open the xpi from the location bar to install it)
2. Right-click anywhere to see the new "Menus created at onInstalled" menu item
3. Visit about:addons and disable then re-enable the add-on,
4. Right-click anywhere again and look for the menu item.

Expected:

• The menu item re-appears

Actual:

• No menu item any more

Extra info:

• Works in Chrome

Comment 3

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

This happens because Firefox deletes the underlying data when the add-on is disabled (source.

We could consider fixing this by triggering onInstalled when an add-on is re-enabled.
That behavior (of onInstalled) has been requested a few days ago at https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/353

Comment 4

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

There are two ways to fix this:

1. Supporting onInstalled at enable as suggested in comment 3.
2. Not removing the data (the approach from bug 1771328, which is similar to this bug - menus disappear when extension is reloaded).

Comment 5

[Alex Cornestean]

Also confirmed based on the STR from Comment 2.

Reproduced on the latest Nightly (112.0a1/20230220165121), Beta (111.0b3/20230219190218) and Release (110.0/20230214051806) under Windows 10 x64 and macOS 11.3.1.

Comment 6

[mb]

Could you confirm that the workaround proposed in bug 1771328, will fix the issue until this bug is resolved?

Comment 7

[mb]

Creating the menu at the top level of the background script works until the browser receives an update. After which, the extension needs to be disabled and re-enabled.

Comment 8

[Stig Nygaard]

The original title of this bug described it as "MV3" related. Title is "neutral" now, but since I don't see it explicitly mentioned, I just want to point out this seems to be a bug affecting MV2-extensions too.

Also a user of one of my (MV2-)extensions says that if you delete file webext.sc.lz4 in Firefox profile (C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\startupCache\webext.sc.lz4) it will remove the menu-item my extension has created. Apparently this is something that CCleaner might do, and according to user, the disappearing menu-item is "my fault", not a problem with CCleaner. I'm not sure about that, should menu-items be robust to deletion of webext.sc.lz4? Is there maybe a connection to this issue?

Comment 10

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

The underlying issue (runtime.onInstalled not firing) already has a more specific bug, at bug 1700797. I'll move the WECG tracking over to that one to decouple it from the menu issue.

In comment 2, I added a test case that allegedly works in Chrome. Despite runtime.onInstalled not firing, the test case worked because the menu registration persisted.

Comment 11

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

This bug will be resolved when bug 1771328 or bug 1700797 (or both) are fixed.