How to remove Disconnect and Disconnect Search extensions?
There are two extensions, Disconnect 3.15.4 and Disconnect Search 1.4.1, in my add-ons manager that are disabled as they could not be verified for use in Firefox. I have attached an image of my add-ons manager. I would like to remove them but the button to do so is missing. I have already refreshed Firefox and attempted to uninstall the extensions manually however my extensions folder inside my profile folder is empty. I also checked the globally installed extensions folder in Library/Application Support/Mozilla/ but that is empty as well. Is there any other solution? I am running OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.6 and Firefox 47.0.1
Modified by DostZeroMachine
Chosen solution
Firefox doesn't display a Remove button for an extension if it was installed into a "shared" location. On Windows, I would suggest the "Uninstall a Program" control panel but on Mac... I'll have to skip to how to research the location to see if that helps.
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show in Finder" button. This should launch a new window listing your settings files.
Scroll down and find extensions.json and make a copy somewhere convenient.
Open the file in Firefox's "Scratchpad" tool as follows. Launch the Scratchpad from the Developer menu, either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Developer > Scratchpad
- (menu bar) Tools > Web Developer > Scratchpad
Use the Open button on the Scratchpad's toolbar to open the backup copy of extensions.json and then click the Pretty Print button on the toolbar to re-layout the data in a more readable format.
Then use Find (Ctrl+f) to search for Disconnect and you should see information about the extension. The descriptor gives its location on disk. (Since characters have to be encoded for JavaScript, you may find \\ or \/ in the path. When exploring your disk, read \\ as \ and \/ as /.)
Can you track them down?
Note: you don't need to save the changes when you exit unless you want to keep the "pretty" version for reference.
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Chosen Solution
Firefox doesn't display a Remove button for an extension if it was installed into a "shared" location. On Windows, I would suggest the "Uninstall a Program" control panel but on Mac... I'll have to skip to how to research the location to see if that helps.
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show in Finder" button. This should launch a new window listing your settings files.
Scroll down and find extensions.json and make a copy somewhere convenient.
Open the file in Firefox's "Scratchpad" tool as follows. Launch the Scratchpad from the Developer menu, either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Developer > Scratchpad
- (menu bar) Tools > Web Developer > Scratchpad
Use the Open button on the Scratchpad's toolbar to open the backup copy of extensions.json and then click the Pretty Print button on the toolbar to re-layout the data in a more readable format.
Then use Find (Ctrl+f) to search for Disconnect and you should see information about the extension. The descriptor gives its location on disk. (Since characters have to be encoded for JavaScript, you may find \\ or \/ in the path. When exploring your disk, read \\ as \ and \/ as /.)
Can you track them down?
Note: you don't need to save the changes when you exit unless you want to keep the "pretty" version for reference.
The descriptor gives me this filepath:
/Library/Application Support/Mozilla/Extensions/{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}/2.0@disconnect.me
However this folder is empty when I go to it.
Okay, let's try quitting Firefox and renaming the extensions.json file to extensions.old and let Firefox rebuild the file at the next startup. Hopefully when it re-reads the folders it will agree with what Finder shows.
Woops, my mistake. I accidentally went to /Library/Application Support/Mozilla/Extensions/ which was empty. However, entering the full filepath worked for me and I was able to delete the folders for the two extensions. They don't show up in the add-on manager for me anymore so your last reply was valid. Thanks for the help and sorry for the confusion.
Hmm, does that mean they were hidden folders? Very odd. Glad you were able to cleanse them.