Firefox ESR 52.5.2 Auto Enable Add-On

Question

Is there a way to force a specific add-on to always be enabled?

During certain software updates the add-on in question is automatically disabled (No idea why) and because this add-on is required to use the web applications that our users use on a daily basis. While some users call a few times and are able to remember the fix action themselves (Go into addons and enable the add-on) other users call after every-single-update and ask us to talk them through enabling it.

Is there a way to force enable this addon? I cannot seem to find a way to force add-ons to be enabled that works as most posts I can find are all the way from 2010-2015. They are pretty out of date and no longer work.

Answer 1

It's not that easy to force a single add-on to be enabled without affecting other addons, as there's no own configuration parameter for each extension.

To see what would be needed to modify, you can use about:config and compare configuration parameter extensions.bootstrappedAddons when a single extension is enabled and disabled: enabling an extension will add a new entry like this (without line breaks):

{
 "version":"x.y.z",  
 "type":"webextension",
 "descriptor":"C:\\path\\to\\the\\profile\\extensions\\{extension}.xpi",
 "multiprocessCompatible":true,
 "runInSafeMode":false,
 "dependencies":[],
 "hasEmbeddedWebExtension":false
}

This means that overwriting this configuration parameter would change the state for all extensions.

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Better approach might be trying to prevent this automatic disable in your default preference file:

pref("extensions.autoDisableScopes", 0);

It's also possible to automatically enable extensions by scopes (not necessarily secure/desired):

pref("extensions.enabledScopes", 15);

Here, the number is a sum of the scope numbers, 15 meaning all i.e. 1+2+4+8:

• 1 (SCOPE_PROFILE), add-on in the current profile directory.
• 2 (SCOPE_USER), extensions in %appdata%\Mozilla\Extensions\
• 4 (SCOPE_APPLICATION), extensions directory within the application binary directory
• 8 (SCOPE_SYSTEM) system extension directory, N/A in Windows.