295462 - Better Method of Installing Thunderbird Extensions Required (add-on)

Status: REOPENED

(Thunderbird :: Add-Ons: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ray Booysen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Because Firefox and Thunderbird share the same extensions for extensions,
installing extensions on Thunderbird requires more work than the simple click in
firefox.

I closed bug 285889 to open a more generic bug here to discuss better ways of
handling this issue.  Current ideas revolving changing extension extensions are
up for discussion as well as any other ideas.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Karsten Düsterloh]

The main problem is that a browser simply can't decide what to do with an .xpi:
if it is usable by both Firefox and Thunderbird, how should it know where you
want it to be installed? In FF, in TB, in both?
So, you'd need a way "Install this .xpi in TB" - this may be an idea for (yet)
another FF extension.

OTOH, the TB extension install dialog *does* support external URIs, you can
simply enter the URI to the .xpi in the file location dialog.
(Well, you /can/ even just download extensions using TB: set the URI to the .xpi
as the mail start page and open that. Yes, this is really gruesome. ;-)

Comment 2

[Ray Booysen]

Hi

My idea of renaming extensions can work.  Different extensions for each product.
 This would obviously leave the need for two copies of the extension if it
worked in both Firefox and Thunderbird but would remove this problem completely.

Comment 3

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Of course it /can/ work, but basing anything upon file extensions instead of
MIME types is quite bad, IMO. (Why should a file extension have anything to do
with a file's content, anyway?) And having n different MIME types for the same
kind of file is pretty awful. 

Having m different extension files that only differ in their file extension but
not in their content is quite ugly and useless also.  

Comment 4

[Ricky Moorhouse]

Maybe the better solution would be if there was a way to call the Thunderbird
extension installer instead of the firefox one from the updates site.

As noted,  the TB extension install dialog *does* support external URIs - but
it's not clear from the interface that you can type in a URI in the 'Select an
extension' dialog box. 
The other thing I hadn't realised was that you can drag a link from firefox into
the thunderbird extensions manager.

Comment 5

[Thomas K. (:tom)]

why not do like other things (aim, yahoo, irc) do and fake a protocol handler?

tbird://gettheme?http://www.site.com/theme.jar or
tbird://getextension?http://www.site.com/extension.xpi

that way it knows to let things (tbird) handle things with that protocol, and
tbird does things right.  of course tbird is subject to change (moztb?).

Comment 6

[Ray Booysen]

Flagging blocking-aviary2.0 as ?

This should definitely be fixed and have a better method for handling extensions
across Thunderbird and Firefox.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Related: bug 313468.

Comment 8

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Maybe there needs to be some per-system 'XUL app registry' in which you can look up an executable name (or a execution line, e.g. "/path/to/myxulapp --install-extension $ext" with $ext set to the extension filename/URI) against the em:id value you find in the XPI. And if you have multiple em:id's there's be a listbox for selecting which app to install the XPI in.

Comment 9

[Scott MacGregor]

I don't think we are going to be able to change how extensions get installed for 2.0. Could be an interesting topic for 3.0 though. 

Comment 15

[Sebastian Moser]

My suggestion in Bug 442550 was a duplicate - sorry for that.

Here's my suggestion:

When Thunderbird is installed, it installs an extension to Firefox, which changes the Firefox add-on installation process. Before Firefox-compatibility is checked, the add-on checks if it's compatible with Thunderbird (or both).

If it is only compatible with Thunderbird, it shows a dialog that allows to install the extension to Thunderbird.
If it is compatible with both (Firefox and Thunderbird), it shows a dialog that allows to choose which application it should be installed to.

---

This isn't a Thunderbird-specific problem, though - it would be great if this worked for other Mozilla-based applications that can have add-ons, so it would of course be preferable, if Firefox included this functionality by default, allowing applications like Thunderbird, Sunbird, Songbird etc. to add their application data (GUID, profile/extension directory, application name, etc.) to a list of "also-XPI-using-applications" in Firefox, making this feature easy to use for others, too.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

related bug 214319, and description at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Extension_Installation

This would be a big UX win and is in the list of goals for TB3, but unsure if this got pruned from the list of priority items. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Thunderbird3

Comment 17

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

FWIW We now have (on trunk) the Get Add-ons pane in the Add-on manager, which should help a lot.

Comment 18

[David Ascher (:davida)]

As much as i agree that we want a smoother experience than we have now, I don't think we'd block tb3 for this bug.

Comment 20

[QwertyChouskie]

How hard would it be to register TB as a URL handler for "tb://" URLs? Then just link to "tb://addons/addon_name/install" in ATN.

Comment 22

[John Bieling]

I am closing this as WORKSFORME.

Links to XPI files on addons.thunderbird.net come back with a response which has the content-disposition header set to attachment. This causes Firefox to download the XPI file, instead of installing it. The downloaded file can then be installed in Thunderbird. In general, the user should browse add-ons directly inside Thunderbird's add-on manager, since he will then see only add-ons compatible with the running version of Thunderbird.

We cannot do much for self-hosted add-ons. The developers of self-hosted Thunderbird add-ons will need to adjust their servers to include the content-disposition header set to attachment in their responses, when users click on XPI download links and the user-agent does not mention Thunderbird.

Comment 23

[John Bieling]

If someone wants to take a deeper look, this is what RobWu pointed to:

If anyone is interested in exploring how to change the logic, the input on what to do is generated at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/578d9c83f046d8c361ac6b98b297c27990d468fd/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/amContentHandler.sys.mjs#29-93

Handled at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/578d9c83f046d8c361ac6b98b297c27990d468fd/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/amManager.sys.mjs#83-166

The immediate caller before actual installation commences is at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/578d9c83f046d8c361ac6b98b297c27990d468fd/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/AddonManager.sys.mjs#2511-2547