Add-ons: Why do so many not work?
I am utterly astounded as to why people are allowed to upload add-ons that obviously are not ready for prime time. These is usually no guidelines showing you how to use them, often it seems impossible to get them to even start. When you search for them often the description is almost non-existent. Why is this happening? Doesn't anybody care? Or is it because there are so many being submitted that they are impossible to regulate or oversee? How about offering a question area that links to this forum? Maybe others that have used a particular add-on could help us strugglers because clearly the designers lack the ability to communicate anything useful here. Did all techies fail Grade 1 English and give up afterwards? I'm perplexed.
I should mention I'm using Firefox 39 (because of constant crashing of more modern versions), not a recent version. On Win7. I wonder if this could be the reason so many don't seem to work. But shouldn't the browser tell me if it won't work? Or is that way too logical?
Modified by moz2u
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Can't seem to delete this post.
Modified by moz2u
It is up to the creators of a program like add-ons to continue to update their programs for the current versions of the browser.
I have several add-ons myself that no longer work. For a while, I would not update Firefox just to keep those running.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ Extended Support Release
allows for add-ons that have not been signed to continue to work.
Starting with Firefox version 48, the add-on signing requirement will be enforced with no override in Release and Beta versions of Firefox. See the MozillaWiki article, Add-ons/Extension Signing for more information.
This will disable add-on signature enforcement; Enter about:config into your Firefox address bar Click the I'll be careful button Find xpinstall.signatures.required in the list Right click the preference Select Toggle until the value is false https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firefox
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/AddOns/Status/Updates#Exec_Summary “Currently targeting Signing with no pref to turn off”
Searched but there was no xpinstall.signatures.required anywhere in the list. There were 3 when I searched for xpinstall.
services.sync.prefs.sync.xpinstall.whitelist.required xpinstall.customConfirmationUI xpinstall.whitelist.required
Can I use any of these?
The instructions I posted to allow the add-ons to work are for the Extended Support Release only.
xpinstall.signatures.required didn't appear until Firefox 41 as I recall.
Some add-ons have a support thread over here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=48 And that dates to before this SuMO forum even existed - 2007. The add-on developer decides where to provide support, it they even provide support for their add-on.
Add-ons support is over here: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/add-ons