672770 - Global extensions are not recognized in Firefox 5

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 566373

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Takafumi Hayashi]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build ID: 20110615151330

Steps to reproduce:

I am using Firefox 5 on MacOsX.
It seems impossible to install global extensions in Firefox 5.0.1.
It was possible in Firefox 3.5/3.6 by simply dropping xpi files in Firefox install directory (/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/extensions)
This feature is particularly useful when you manage several profiles and you don't want to install your extensions in every profile.

I  spent a couple hours trying to deploy extensions on Mac OS X 10.6.8 without success.

Futhermore, the "-install-global-extension" parameter doesn't work since ff 3.5.

Comment 1

[Richard van den Berg]

I can confirm this bug on Windows XP running Firefox 5.0.1. Dropping an xpi file in <installation directory>/extensions as described in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions#Global_installation does not trigger the installation.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I think you are missing the app-id and you have to extract the extension:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Installing_extensions

Comment 3

[Richard van den Berg]

@Matti: did you read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions#Global_installation ? This bug is about the easy method of dropping an xpi into the extensions folder that is no longer working with FF 5.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I put Adblock Plus into the following folder and it works fine:

/Library/Application Support/Mozilla/Extensions/{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}.xpi

I'm sure that you forgot to change the name of the XPI to have the id in its name. Without that it will not work, that's correct.

Comment 5

[Richard van den Berg]

@Henrik: please read the first bullet of http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions#Global_installation and http://support.mozilla.com/nl/questions/825204 to understand what this bug is about. Then please reopen this bug, unless you can point us to a discussion that shows that this functionality has been removed.

Comment 6

[Richard van den Berg]

Btw, when I download Adblock Plus it is named adblock_plus-1.3.9-fx+tb+sm+fn.xpi If it is now required to rename that file to {d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}.xpi before placing it in <installation directory>/extensions, this is still a usability bug IMHO.

Comment 7

[Richard van den Berg]

Ok, dropping the adblock_plus-1.3.9-fx+tb+sm+fn.xpi into C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions\{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}.xpi does not *install* the XPI as it used to in FF 3.x. It now just runs the extension straight from the xpi. This bug is about the fact that in FF 3.x any xpi dropped in <installation directory>/extensions would get installed (with a pop-up requesting the user to confirm this) as a global extension. Instead it is now required to manually extract the id from the xpi/install.rdf and rename the xpi. Not quite the same thing.

Comment 8

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

We do not support any documentation on mozillazine. If it is outdated someone from its community has to update the affected pages.

While reading this bug once more, I was able to remember the right bug which already tracks this issue. Duping against.