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• Launchpad Entry: firefox-distro-addon-spec

• Packages affected: firefox, thunderbird, packaged extensions & plugins

Summary

Rationale

Not all extensions/plugins for firefox are "good" for various definitions of good. They also can be quite hard to find. Some are also properly packaged, but this is not widely known.

Use Cases

• Jono wants to watch weird metal videos on youtube and needs flash support for that
• Aleksander is an Ubuntu developer who wants people to use proper packages instead of downloaded extensions
• On Sarahs pc, firefox is crashing all the time due to bad extensions. She doesn't know this and simply wants this to not happen.

Objectives and Options

Educate users about ubuntu maintained extension packages

In order to educate users about ubuntu maintained packages multiple options exist:

1. add extra tab to Add-On dialog that embeds a gnome-app-install list of available extension and allow direct installation.
   • Pro: useful upstream
   • Cons: redo much of already implemented code; only feasible for users with admin privileges.
2. extend Add-On dialog to allow user to start gnome-app-install (adapt-install) with a list of suitable exstensions
   • Pro: reuse gnome-app-install/adapt-install; not yet another package installation dialog
   • Cons: probably not for upstream; only feasible for users with admin privileges
3. provide a way to install native extensions maintained by ubuntu in the user profile
   • Pro: feasible for all ubuntu users (e.g. non-privileged user account)
   • Cons: not feasible for global extension installation on its own; distribution through .deb packages might not be most genuine way to distribute such extensions.

For now, the preference seems to be the second option since it's relatively easy to do *in firefox* and most likely to get upstream approval. Option 3 is nice-to-have, but should probably go to a separate spec to be implemented once the global install option has been implemented.

A possible solution would be extra control fields like:

XB-mozilla-extension-app: app-id-for-firefox-and-or-thunderbird
XB-mozilla-extension-ext: id-for-extension

This also helps in the second part.

Blacklisting

There are four reasons for blacklisting an extension:

• It is known that the extension is broken
• The extension contains native parts, which are compiled in a way that's incompatible with Ubuntu
• The extension causes problems when installed together with other extensions (I'd say "conflicts" here, but Ian would probably yell "Breaks")
• The extension also exists as an Ubuntu package

The blacklist format should be able to express this, and also which versions of extensions are broken.

The extension install process already looks at its own internal database of conflicts and does version checks. According to asac the process to plug in our own checks is fairly straightforward.

Scope

This spec covers plugin and extension installation on both firefox and thunderbird.

• new data for gnome-app-install (adapt-install in case of kde) with infos about ubuntu provided extensions
• (probably) gnome-app-install and adapt-install need to be able use custom package data (see above)
• extension manager (ffox, tbird) hooks to add blacklist/compatibility checks during extension installation
• install wizard
  • get user confirmation to install extensions that have compatibility issues or cause crashes
  • allow alternative install of ubuntu packages if applicable

Implementation

Outstanding Issues

We still need to look at the plugins part of this, plugins are done differently

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec