301874 - document app-global and app-registry extension/theme installs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Help Documentation, enhancement)

Description

[David Masterson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4

Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see documentation telling the administrator of a
system how to install themes/extensions/plugins *once* so that all his users
will immediately have access to it rather than install it themselves.  The
interface for getting these things could be made much simpler as well.  The
first question that a user of Firefox will ask is do I have all of the pieces
that I want to make Firefox nice and friendly.  Mozilla, for instance, had a
help menu to show you what plugins are installed -- why doesn't Firefox?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Check the docs for extension information
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
No information on installing extensions system-wide.

Expected Results:  
Provide more documentation on the installation of Firefox system-wide.

Comment 1

[Steffen Wilberg]

*** Bug 335254 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Wow, the article pointed by the URL is soooo loooonnnnggg!  Come on, isn't there a shorter version just mentioning the essential point: what to do to install an extension in system-wide manner?  Technical details are to be shown in another page.

OTOH, it would be nice if extension website could have a link to such informations  as to how install global extension.

Comment 3

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/extensions/commandlineoptions.html

The -install-global-extension and -install-global-theme require that the extension you are installing is compatible with the application version which can be verified by installing it using the normal methods into the profile.

Also, there is another method...
1) extract the xpi (it is in compressed zip format) into an empty directory
2) open the install.rdf that was extracted and find the <em:id>GUID</em:id> inside the first <Description... tag
3) rename the directory that contains the install.rdf and other files / directories to the same string as what appears in between the <em:id> and </em:id> (e.g. GUID above and it will most likely look like {6f84950a-d636-21f1-a440-a67d3eed920e}
4) place the directory in the application's extensions directory and run Firefox 1 time.

After doing that you can copy that into the application's extensions directory on any system and it should just work.

The 

Comment 4

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Well, I prefer the -install-global-extension parameter (which works for themes as well, by the way) which is a lot simpler.  Actually, I created a little script that when I drag and drop the extension on it, it's installed.

Comment 5

[Jeff Walden (gone starting June 8)]

This shouldn't be in built-in help docs (although it might have a place in online docs if/when they happen).  For now I think it probably belongs where it is on MDC.

I looked at the linked docs, and aside from being rather long I didn't see anything obviously wrong or out-of-date (although the doc feels too much like developer d11n and not enough like administrator d11n, which should be fixed, but isn't as high a priority as ensuring that *some* docs exist).  What else needs to be done here to fix this?

Comment 6

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

I agree with all of comment #5. The help docs should only include help for things that apply to the vast majority of people and installing into the app-global location and app-registry locations is something few people will or should do.

Comment 7

[Steffen Wilberg]

Ugh, thanks for fixing the QA Contact.

I agree that this is WONTFIX for now, mostly because we're not even documenting profiles.

I guess the easiest way to install an extension app-global is this one:
1. Copy an xpi into <appdir>/extensions/
2. Restart Firefox
3. Click Install on the Software Installation prompt ("The following items were found in your Extensions folder. Do you want to install them?")
See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Enhanced_Extension_Installation#Installation_2.

Note that any user can uninstall the extension if he has write access to that directory.

Comment 8

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

*** Bug 346693 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***