After installation nothing happens

Add-ons Development
#1

Hello my extension has been in production (not publicly listed) for some months now. The XPI extension is built on top of the addon sdk and cfx tool.

Over this months we had several users reporting the addon to install but nothing happening after installation, which is:

The icon won’t show in the toolbar/menu neither in the customize panel, it is just not present.

Following the “remove preferences files from the user profile directory” guide is not working.

Over the several release I’ve tried to do all that i found relevant, but still the addon is reported as not working from time to time (a few user fortunately, but still it’s a serious problem for a company’s product).

Most failures have been reported from OSX with up to date Firefox installed (but it happened also on a couple of windows machines).

My package.json contains the default icon.png explicitly which is in the root of the building dir as per default.
All .png are regular files (not overly compressed by minifing tools stripping metadata).
On the latest build i’ve also tried ‘unpack’: true in package.json but it didn’t help.

In the main.js i’m dinamically setting the icon passing the ui.ActionButton icon field an object containing all 4 resolutions for the icon i want depending on the page’s content (i’ve tried single resolution string as the value, both dinamically generated and hardcoded string).

Everything works fine for 99% of the users, but those fails are still there, some of our users have been so kind to try to reinstall firefox and nothing changed. We have not been able to reproduce the bug locally, and it’s hard to understand what’s going on since those users are all around the world.

Any guess, similar story, know bug, suggestion on how to sort this out?

#2

Hi, I had the same problem. Try to play with the Privacy Settings, If you do not allow chronicle or if you are activate private mode, the addon will not appear. I hope you can fix your problem. mh

#3

You could ask some of your users to inspect the error console to see whether there is a warning/error thrown related to your add-on.

#4

Was just able to replicate this with a remote user, nothing shows up in the consoles of any opened tab (is there any logs to file where firefox logs at browser level?).

Firefox addon list shows the extension is installed but no icons anywhere.

I would say the code from main.js does get to run at all, as in main.js i open a new tab from the ‘exports.main’ function, this always works but not tab was open in this case.

#5

Have you asked the user to try to customize the toolbar? It could be the button just wasn’t added to the toolbar but is still present in the customization panel.

#6

Matthias you where right, we tested the “Never remember history” and it was the problem, didn’t got it at first what ‘do not allow chronicle’ meant, my fault.

I managed to fix it adding to the manifest:
“permissions”: { “private-browsing”: true }

Do you know if this will be fine for the automatic addon update? Will the user be prompted to accept new persmission? Will the extension be disabled waiting for the user to go to the extension page and reenable it?

The documentation states:
"Note that some changes to a manifest, and hence the installation, may require user approval before the update is actioned."
But doesn’t says if this is the case and mostly doesn’t enter the details of what the user will see or not see, we are very worried about users having the extension just disappear.

#7

I had the same problem, however, I don’t understand why a default Theme woud have Dark Blue Fonts on Black Wallpaper.This Add-on Format is all over the place and difficult to navigate. I have some vision problems, buI can barely read most of this Dark Bluen Black. A default Theme should have good contrast between Fonts and background so anyone can read the Text. As far as these Add-on’s are concerned, I had the understanding that Add-on section had a test before installation, however the only message I got was that the Ad-on was installed, but no screen change. Am I suppoe to shut down, reboot, and see what I ended up with, if anything.