Comments on: Component Directory Lockdown – New in Firefox 3.6

By: Home Security Cameras

Home Security Cameras — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:41:39 +0000

This sounds like a great idea. Not that Firefox crashes often on my Mac anyway, but I have had issues with extensions, on a few occasions after a crash.

By: OuT

OuT — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:26:16 +0000

I know nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt will still be copied, but simply ignored, and won’t block essential QT stuff. Nevertheless Apple has to fix this.

By the way, could you tell me a concrete application of XPCOM with QT ? I cannot find anyone… I’m also searching for an application of XPCOM with Flash Player (flashplayer.xpt, it used to be installed directly in components dir, some time ago).

I’d simply like to know the purpose of these components

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:02:50 +0000

OuT: The change here does not stop programs from copying files into the component directory. They shouldn’t have been doing so (there are several well-defined mechanisms by which they can add their stuff that don’t involve mucking with the installation directory of another product), but acknowledging that they do we simply don’t load components that were not built with the product.

.xpt files are simply data structures describing interfaces, they are not executable code. If we don’t load the associated components then those interfaces will not be used.

By: OuT

OuT — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:47:32 +0000

Hi,

QuickTime still copies nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt into the components dir… how this case will be handled ?

Regards

By: markafoni davetiyesi

markafoni davetiyesi — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:35:40 +0000

Firefox 3.6 has not been released yet, you do not have “ff 3.6 final”. Keep reporting those crashes: that’s how we know which ones are the most important to focus on. If you’re crashing 20 times a day, though, you’re suffering from some software incompatibility between Firefox and something else on your system. Please visit the forums at http://support.mozilla.com and they can help you figure out what’s going on from you reported crashes and probably help you identify the culprit.

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:36:11 +0000

I read too quickly and assumed you were talking about this blog post, but you were talking about addon compatibility version checks which is something else entirely. Beta users do sign up for a little pain in that regard, but you can help if you like by using the Addon Compatibility Reporter which will reenable all of your addons and let you report which ones work and which don’t.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003

Or you can wait until after we ship 3.6 by which point most of the addons should be compatible.

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:30:00 +0000

This feature is not about addons, this prevents 3rd party software from hooking into Firefox in a way that is guaranteed to break (and does) at the next major update. Possibly on a minor update for binary components depending if they were using an interface we had to patch. This was never a recommended or even documented mechanism for extending Firefox, and we’ve found a large percentage of the crashes experienced by Firefox 3.5 users is due to 3rd party components hooked in this way.

Plugins and Addons hooked in through the documented places certainly do cause their share of stability problems also, but since it is possible for users to know about and manage them we do let you make your own tradeoff between functionality and possible instability.

By: Zetaprime

Zetaprime — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:10:50 +0000

Is there anyway to disable this feature? I’d like to be able to decide which addons I can keep and not have Firefox tell me I can’t use them. I already had to uninstall 3.6 beta 3 and go back to beta 2 to get my addons back. Let me decide if I can live with a certain degree of instability in exchange for the functionality many of these addons provide.

By: Daniel Veditz

Daniel Veditz — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:47:10 +0000

In what other application is it normal to modify their installation directory? We have published for years several appropriate ways to extend Firefox and this was not one of them. It happened to work, but it was never a supported way for 3rd parties to modify a Firefox installation.

By: Dis Gruntled

Dis Gruntled — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:35:51 +0000

Once again, Mozilla shows love to their large developer base by easing in a significant change thru a tried-and-true deprecation process, whereby developers are encouraged to make the necessary changes over a period of time, many months in advance of Firefox dropping a key feature.

Wait… um… OK, scratch that. Nevermind.