831991 - downloads manager fails to display downloads from downloadhelper

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[George R. Goffe]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20130115 Firefox/21.0
Build ID: 20130115030936

Steps to reproduce:

attempted to use downloadhelper (add-on).


Actual results:

the requested files fail to appear in download manager display.


Expected results:

recent changes to FF Nightly have caused this problem to appear. This has been a continuing problem for the past few months, since the notifications project began. I don't understand why this is continuing to happen.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

>I don't understand why this is continuing to happen.
I guess because the download code gets currently changed all the time ?
Anyway, we don't track extension issues in bugzilla

Comment 2

[George R. Goffe]

Matthias,

This seems to be a bit irresponsible to me as well as counter the Mozilla objective.

George...

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

This extension is a classic addon and that isn't using a fixed API.
What should we do ?
Stop a new feature like the download panel because an addon could break ?

This can be only fixed if all development of Firefox would be stopped.

You are using a nightly build and a nightly is changing every day.
It could happen that the nightly deletes your Firefox profile (bookmarks, stored passwords) or format your file system due to bugs.

I don't understand why you are complaining .....

Comment 4

[George R. Goffe]

Matti,

Thanks for your response.

Is there a "standard" API for downloadhelper and other add-ons to use?

I would think that the VERY SERIOUS problems you list would be caught by unit testing... IF Firefox does unit testing.

Is Nightly the FF unit test? I was complaining that DH was breaking frequently. I consider DH very useful.

Thanks again for your responses.

George...

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

>Is there a "standard" API for downloadhelper and other add-ons to use?
Yes, this API was created under the project name "jetpack" but as every API this limits the extension.
A classic extension can do everything that the browser can do.

>IF Firefox does unit testing.
Yes, every checkin into the source triggers thousands of different tests but this tests don't find everything or we wouldn't have regressions.
You can compare that with AV Software, they usually only find already known viruses but not unknown ones.

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I forgot to add:
All extensions that require a restart after an installation are classic extensions.
Extensions that can be used without restart could be jetpack based extensions

Comment 7

[Michel Gutierrez]

From the extension side, we cannot roll out an update at every nightly change. For information, Video DownloadHelper has over 7 million daily users.

Basically, the strategy is that we monitor bug reports of the addon broken in the Nightly, we care when it's in Aurora, we worry when in Beta and we panic when in Release.