About installing add-ons on web pages

[Justineo (GU Yiling)]

Hi,

I’m trying to add a direct install button on my add-on homepage, like ZenHub (https://www.zenhub.io/) does. (ZenHub’s install doesn’t seem to finish correctly as well.)

I found the following documentation and followed its instructions:

Installing Extensions and Themes From Web Pages

But the installation using InstallTrigger.install() seems always being blocked by Firefox (now I know it is a security feature). The real problem is that after user manually permits the install and when the install completes, the callback is never called (so I won’t know if it ends well or not). After some digging a found here:

install

It says:

In Firefox 3 the callback is no longer invoked unless the website performing the installation is whitelisted.

Does this means that there’s no way to tell if the installation is succeeded, failed or blocked after the process ends for websites outside the whitelist?

–

GU Yiling (Justineo)
Baidu Inc.

[Justineo (GU Yiling)]

There is a question on StackOverflow about the same problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29830253/firefox-addon-inline-installation-from-website

I also found that the InstallTrigger.install may cause some security problems a long time ago (which I assume was the reason to disable callbacks here) and I wonder if there’s a better way to fix the problem rather than only allow callbacks on whitelisted sites.