Add-ons that break Websites & Add-on Management

Add-ons
#1

I use a fair amount of Add-ons and sometimes come across Websites that don’t seem to work properly. I have identified 4~5 Tracker Blocker Add-ons that are regularly the culprits, but sometimes I need to dig deeper and it becomes very tedious Enabling / Disabling each Add-on to know which one(s) are causing this.

Is there no way to manage Add-ons in batches? To have an Add-on that is an Add-on Manager so to speak?

I’ve also looked into creating a separate Firefox account to be able to launch a “clean-slate” Firefox Window, but so far this has been unsuccessful.

How do you guys go about managing your Add-ons? Any help is very welcome. I’m a bit at a loss right now. Thanks.

#2

I use about:addons for desktop, but it doesn’t have the batching capability you mentioned.

#3

For practical reasons, it may be best to reduce number of addons, especially if they are not well maintained.

But I know what you mean, when a page won’t load properly and I suspect it’s some poorly hidden cookie popup, I try to disable “I don’t care about cookies” and “uBlock origin” addons on the current page.

Note that these kind of addons usually comes with “disable for this domain” feature, so you don’t have to disable the addons completely, just for the current page:
image

And after the click, the icon often changed to “refresh page” icon to help you see if it helped:
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#4

Yeah, it should be possible for a developer to build an extension manager extension. The key API here is the Management API (surprise!). For the specific use case you’re describing, the main method you’ll want is management.setEnabled().

As for setting up a clean Firefox profile, there’s not too much to it:

  1. Open about:profiles in Firefox.
  2. Click the “Create a New Profile” button near the top of the page.
  3. Go through the setup wizard.
  4. Scroll down to your new profile (I think they’re sorted by age) and click “Launch profile in new browser”

Ta da, new Firefox session with a clean profile! :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

The documentation says “The function allows enabling/disabling of theme addons, but will return an error if used to enable or disable other types of web extension.”

The documentation for chrome.management.setEnabled doesn’t mention such a restriction.
It’s strange to see Firefox being more restrictive than Chrome.