963972 - require('sdk/tabs/utils') does not work in FF26-29

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Mingyi Liu]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131205075310

Steps to reproduce:

Try to put either
var { getActiveTab } = require('sdk/tabs/utils');
or
var tabUtils = require("sdk/tabs/utils");
in an Addon SDK-based addon code at beginning.


Actual results:

Execution of code fails at the tabs/utils line in FF26 stable and FF29 nightly.


Expected results:

Either or both ways should have worked. I know tabs/utils are labeled as unstable, but for now I need it as a replacement for the deprecated tab-browser.activeTab since FF29 nightly retired sdk/deprecated/tab-browser, and tabs/utils is supposed to be the replacement.  Any idea why this doesn't work?

Comment 1

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

this seems strange.. the module is labeled "unstable", but it should work in Fx26/29.

> Execution of code fails at the tabs/utils line in FF26 stable and FF29
> nightly.

can you provide the exact error/exception that is reported at that line? 

also, can you provide a bit more information on your environment/installation/testing process? what version of SDK are you using? what version of Python? are you testing your addon via the `cfx run` command line, or packing it with `cfx xpi` and adding it to firefox manually?

most likely it's an outdated SDK version.. can you try SDK 1.15 (for release Firefox), or even pull the master branch from git (for use with Nightly).

Comment 2

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

I suspect this is from an outdated SDK -- 1.16 should be released soon in bug 961846.

Also, using the master branch from the repository like Tomislav mentioned should do the trick

Comment 3

[Mingyi Liu]

Sorry, been busy lately.  I was using SDK 1.15.  I tried to make a minimal addon as example and found that the code actually worked there.  However, it didn't work in my Fastest Search addon, which worked fine otherwise.  I think there's some condition that would make this code not work, but did not find out what condition it was yet.  Will try again soon and post here.

Comment 4

[Mingyi Liu]

I did a little more testing but didn't have time to extensively do it.  It was inconclusive. On different FF version this bug may or may not show up, and when it doesn't show up I do notice some other error message that disabled part of my addon and it seems related to this line (remove it the issue's gone).  

Anyway you can close this bug for now as I do not have time to test more on this. But given that its inconsistent behavior, it's not a reliable API it seems and I won't be using it or testing more on it.