FF43: Originally Side-Loaded Plugin Failing After Upgrade

Add-ons Add-on Support
#1

Hello,
We’re the developers of the SavvyConnect Addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/savvyconnect/?src=ss

We would like to request that you change the status of the SavvyConnect add-on to allow side-loading. Our users’ add-ons are being disabled after upgrading to Firefox 43, and this is causing significant impact to our business. We used to install our add-on via a custom installer, but recently switched to using the Mozilla add-on store. We have been researching this issue, and closely monitoring various forums to see if other add-on providers are experiencing something similar. We found this google groups post that indicates Mozilla has enabled side-loading for at least one other add-on where users are experiencing a similar issue.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.addons.user-experience/n0r6tXbIYx0

That post references a bugzilla report, which seems to admit this is a bug, which has been addressed, but the fix will not be in place for quite a while:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233459

Our belief is that if side-loading permission is enabled for our addon, users who originally side-loaded the addon will continue to have a normal experience after upgrading to Firefox 43.

We will incur significant business impact if we were to wait for this fix. We appreciate your prompt attention to this request.

Thank you, and happy holidays!

#2

You can request full review (incl side-loading permission) in your developer hub on AMO.

#3

Hi Andreas,

I’m the development manager at Luth Research, and I wanted to follow up with you regarding this post. Is there an escalation path for requests of this sort, if so, can you let me know what that is?

Our add-on is being disabled due to a verified defect in Firefox 43, one that has been resolved but is not yet available (see bugzilla report in Nick’s original post).

As a company that previously deployed our Firefox add-on via a custom install program, and then went through the non-trivial process of getting our add-on deployed to the Mozilla store, we felt we’d done all that we could with respect to following the rules Mozilla has laid out (which we heartily welcome and endorse, btw!) to get our add-on signed and available on the Mozilla store, and helping ensure no significant business impact on our end. But unfortunately since the FF43 go-live, we’re seeing our user base dwindle from thousands to hundreds, and heading lower every day, and this is seriously impacting our business. We never intended to go through the full review process, since we plan only to support Mozilla store-based installs, and did not want to incur the cost/time delays of full review.

Our add-on is not one that is in someone’s face all the time, so it is easy for users to not notice the add-on has been disabled. I’m sure you can understand the dire situation we’re in, and I’m hopeful you can help us figure something out.

Please do let me know if you have any suggestions and/or if there is an escalation path to be followed here. Thanks!

#4

Sorry, there is nothing we can do besides giving this add-on a full review.

A known workaround we identified so far is to uninstall/reinstall the add-on.

#5

Thanks, Andreas. I appreciate your prompt feedback, although wish you had a different answer for us, as we’ve now lost ~80% of our users. We thought we had done everything necessary to ensure a smooth transition. But it is what it is, and we’ve started our campaign to notify users that they need to manually remove/re-install. Hopefully we’ll get past this soon.

I just have a couple quick questions, then I’ll stop bugging you on this :wink::

  1. if I’m interpreting bugzilla properly, it seems the issue in FF43 has been identified, but not yet resolved. Are you able to confirm that? More specifically, can you tell us when https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233459 fix will make its way into a Firefox release? 44? 45? Is there anything we can do to escalate release of this fix?

  2. Our add-on was rejected during a prior attempt at full review, and we didn’t plan to make another attempt at full review. We have some work to do to address the issue reported. Assuming we address that issue and there are no other issues, for planning purposes, how long should we expect the full review process to take? Last time we checked it seemed to take quite a while, wondering if that’s still the case.

Thanks,

#6

You might also want to follow https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1234658. Those bugs will have the most up to date information. I don’t have any information beyond what’s in there.[quote=“bobped, post:5, topic:6193”]
Our add-on was rejected during a prior attempt at full review, and we didn’t plan to make another attempt at full review. We have some work to do to address the issue reported. Assuming we address that issue and there are no other issues, for planning purposes, how long should we expect the full review process to take? Last time we checked it seemed to take quite a while, wondering if that’s still the case.
[/quote]
That depends on a lot of factors. There used to be a general estimation but that has been inaccurate for months now, so I can’t give you any numbers.

#7

Thanks, please let us know if you need any data from us for resolution of any of these tickets. In case its helpful for debugging purposes, in our case, we also found there are 3 flags in extensions.json which, when manually tweaked cause our add-on to be enabled for that specific profile. This was from a PC where the add-on was originally side-loaded from our custom installer (pre-42), then auto-updated from AMO, then FF upgraded to FF43.

foreignInstall – change from true to false
appDisabled – change from true to false
active – change from false to true