791810 - Unable to install an app on a mac without admin privileges

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Web Apps, defect, P3)

Description

[Flore Allemandou [:flore]]

Attachment: Error generated by app on a mac and launched by a different user

Try to install an app from marketplace on a mac without admin privileges:
- Sign in to marketplace
- Choose an app and install it
- Aurora claims it is installed but it is nowhere to be found

- Switch to user with admin privileges
- Sign in to marketplace
- Choose an app and install it
- Aurora installs it in /Applications folder. The application works correctly

- Switch back to normal user
- Launch the app installed by admin
- Error (see attachment)

What it should do (2 alternate methods):
- Ask the user to enter admin login and password and install in /Applications and make sure that the application can be launched by any user of the computer
- Install application in /User/Applications, only the current user can launch it, however no admin privileges are required.

Comment 2

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Users without admin privileges can't install apps on Mac.

Comment 3

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Attachment: fix_mac_unprivileged_installation

Install the app to the user applications directory if the local applications directory isn't writable.

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(the patch applies on top of the patch in bug 710786, that should land soon)

Comment 5

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Comment on attachment 786086 [details] [diff] [review]
fix_mac_unprivileged_installation

This works, but has the unfortunate side effect that the operating system thinks the application is installed for all the users...

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Any progress on this?  Anything I can do to help it along?  I routinely run my own laptop without admin privs so I'm a good test case. :-)

Comment 9

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

As a complete outsider coming into this and not being very familiar with the inner workings of Firefox (so my interpretation of what's going on may be totally off, someone please correct me if so)...

The one thing I see wrong with the way this is all implemented is that the application which is created appears to have a lot of dependency on stuff outside the application directory which is created by the installer at the same time the application is installed.  Said stuff is placed in the user home directory of the user installing the app.  If said stuff is missing, the app crashes or fails to launch.  This is why (even with the permissions fixed) installing the app as an admin user and then trying to run it as a different user doesn't work.

I think the correct way to do all of this is to have all of that stuff outside of the application directory which it depends on to be installed by the application on first launch, if it's missing, rather than by the installer before it's launched the first time.  This way an application installed by an admin could be used by all users and they'd get their profiles created on first launch if they hadn't used it yet, etc.

Comment 10

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Dave: sorry for the delay responding.  Unfortunately, there isn't anyone working on this, so there's been no progress.  There's some investigation and design work to do here (plus testing and QA), but mostly the work required is coding.  If we had someone to do the work, then I expect we could resolve this bug in short order.  But we're not there at the moment. :-/

Comment 11

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per bug 1238079, we're going to disable the desktop web runtime and remove it
from the codebase, so we won't fix these bugs in the integration between Firefox and the runtime.