793908 - addon incompatible with targetApplication should provide more specific error

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Walter Lapchynski]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/12.04 Chromium/20.0.1132.47 Chrome/20.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to install https-everywhere add-on from https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere using either the stable or development versions (I tried 2.2.2 and 7, respectively).


Actual results:

It proceeded to ask me for permission to install, then started the download. When it was finished and attempted to install, I got the error "HTTPS Everywhere could not be installed because it is incompatible with Firefox Beta 16."


Expected results:

It should have provided the error "HTTPS Everywhere could not be installed because it is incompatible with Firefox For Android" (which the plugin presently is though they're working to remedy that). 

In other words, the more general bug (perhaps with Firefox in general) is that when checking compatibility, if there is an error with the version, it should proceed as currently programmed, but if the issue is that the targetApplication GUID is not found in the add-on's install.rdf, it should report "<add on name> could not be installed because it is compatible with <target application>." 

It might even make sense to use stronger language like "<add on name> has not been created to be compatible with any version of <target application>" just to remove all ambiguity. 

I went on a manhunt to figure out why the versions were incompatible despite the fact that everything suggested they should be before I realized that it was the GUID that was the problem. A more informative error could have saved me some time.

Comment 1

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Ok, if this is a problem on Firefox Desktop too, then this should be moved to Toolkit->Addons Manager.

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

The add-ons manager just displays the application name from branding here, if the branding had a different name for Firefox for Android then that would solve this. Not sure of an alternative to that.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.