I want to change the name of my Firefox extension from “eBird reviewer utilities” to “eBird reviewer assistant”. I thought that it would be sufficient simply to change the name in the manifest:
Firefox on my Windows 11 laptop processed this exactly as I expected, picking up the new version and new name. However, Firefox on my Windows 11 desktop does not recognize that there is an update, it only says no updates available. Likewise, Firefox on my Android phone has not picked up the update.
I noticed that the name on the product page was still the old one, so I tried renaming it there, and bumping to version to 1.3.47.1. On the Developer Hub, the extension is correctly listed with the new name and version (see attached screenshot)
However, my desktop running at 1.3.46 still says “No updates found”. (See second attached screenshot)
So my first question is, is the confusion related to the attempted name change? And secondly, regardless of the reason, how do I get the update recognized?
The addon content on the “about:addons” page is heavily cached, I’ve noticed it too that changes in description are not reflected.
The “check for updates” request is also cached, but only for like ~20 minutes.
Firefox for Android checks for updates automatically, but only every 24h.
In other words, this is an issue that will fix itself .
Regarding caching, I waited more than 24 hours before I even posted my question, and it is now well beyond 48 hours. It is not a caching problem. I have done many dozens of updates before and I have never had this situation before, where manually running an update check falsely reports no updates.
I set app.update.lastUpdateTime.addon-background-update-timer to 1 and that had no effect.
The attached image shows another wrinkle. After I run the main Check for Updates and it says “No updates found”, then the button next to my extension has a little green dot that is not present for extensions that have no updates. Clicking the three-dot menu button gives a popup that has an entry “Update” with a green dot; extensions with no updates do not have this. Nevertheless, clicking on “Update” at this point yields “No updates found” and it goes back to not having the green dot.
One more thing, I fired up my little-used MacOS laptop, and Firefox on MacOS installed the update correctly. So that’s two laptops, one Windows and one MacOS, that have done the correct thing, and a Windows desktop and two Android devices that are not doing the correct thing. I guess I can just uninstall and reinstall but I’d rather get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Aha, thanks! The circumvention mentioned in 1984724 - Addons cannot be updated using about:addons . did work for me on my desktop. The two laptops on which Firefox worked correctly for me would have had older Firefox releases at the time and thus did not have this bug.
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