Hello, TL;DR; - It doesn't seem like AddonManager works from AutoConfig as of Firefox 57. I need it or similar functionality or I have to pull Firefox from nearly 7,000 machines.
For a number of years we have used the Firefox AutoConfig system in combination with the AddonManager (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Add-on_Manager/AddonManager#Method_Overview) APIs to configure Firefox in a way that balances user experience with security and compliance concerns. In short, we maintain a whitelist of approved extensions that users can install for themselves in Firefox using the standard user interface. By registering for various callbacks from AddonManager, we can prevent the installation of extensions that aren't on the whitelist and direct users to contact IT to get them added. We can also remove previously whitelisted extensions if their behavior or our policies change and pre-load Firefox with extensions based on some simple imperative logic in the AutoConfig JS, but the big thing is the whitelisting. We have a diverse set of users with very different requirements, they want lots of different extensions, simply pre-installing a few (which is actually quite messy, even with CCK2) does not meet the requirements here. A lot of things about our AutoConfig broke in 57, including the whitelisting using AddonManager. It's pretty difficult to even debug what is happening because our logging via OS.File APIs also doesn't work now either (that we can live with). I'm assuming that it's broken because AutoConfig is now running with similar restrictions to a WebExtension and there's a big warning on the AddonManager page about how this API is not available from WebExtensions. I understand how APIs like this are probably not appropriate for extensions, but AutoConfig seems like a different case. I don't want to make this about Chrome, but it has support for this type of extension whitelisting functionality out-of-the-box (http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#ExtensionInstallWhitelist). Maintaining a choice in browsers was important enough for us to invest the effort to build the whitelisting functionality for Firefox. Now it seems like we've lost it and there's no path to getting it back. Without whitelisting, we'd have to block all extensions, and at that point the value proposition to supporting Firefox is questionable. We'd just force everyone to use Chrome. I really don't want to pull Firefox from our fleet. We have lots of long time Firefox users (myself included) that want to keep using it. The changes in 57 seem great in general and the future looks even better. I hope someone can help me figure out how to keep it as an option for our users. Thanks Matt White
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