638799 - Add pre-upgrade hooks to deb packages to warn of impending extension incompatibility

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, enhancement)

Description

[Tim McCormack]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110221 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.14
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110221 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.14

When I upgrade Firefox using Synaptic package manager, there is no warning when I extensions will be disabled for version incompatibility. While local installs of Firefox have the ability to warn the user of this (*pre*-upgrade), APT managed installs do not.

This is a major annoyance because I rely on certain extensions to make the internet not suck, and some of them are not in active maintenance. I often avoid upgrading Firefox on new minor and major version bumps because of this. Major versions bumps are especially bad because they may result in changes to datastore formats, and downgrades are not guaranteed to protect my data. The result is that I have to back up my profile before upgrade, do the upgrade, check if anything important broke, and if so, downgrade and restore.

The only tricky part here I can see here is that there *may* be multiple users with Firefox profiles on the system. An upgrade warning should *not* by default list out the extensions that each user may have new version incompatibility with on upgrade. However, I am confident that the developers can work out a solution that balances user privacy with sufficient reporting.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[[:Aleksej]]

This should probably be filed/found in Ubuntu's BTS (https://bugs.launchpad.net/)?

Comment 2

[Josh Triplett]

This is a distro bug, not a Firefox bug.  Please file it in the bug-tracking system for your distribution, in this case Ubuntu.