What happened to a deleted add-on? (Sidebery, but any other add-on as well)

Add-ons addons.mozilla.org
#1

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect (and feasible to implement) that any extension, once published in Mozilla add-on directory, can’t ever be unpublished without a notice?

The notice would say whether it’s been flagged and is pending review, or it was taken down by the author/Mozilla due to %REASON%.

Sidebery looked to be the smoothest tree-style tab sidebar extension out there, but now it’s gone and I stopped using Firefox as I’m stuck deciding whether it’d be paranoid of me to surgically remove this extension from my Firefox profile before launching the browser again (i.e., what if Mozilla took it down because the minified build was infected or intentionally malicious).

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#2

Usually authors mention problems with review of their extension. I don’t see that here:

If you go to about:debugging and click This Firefox, you can get the Extension ID of any enabled extension. Then you can search that in Bugzilla to see whether it was blocked. I don’t know of any other reliable way to find that out.

If you don’t want to enable the extension, you can open its XPI file in an unarchiving program (it’s a ZIP archive) and look in the manifest.json file to see whether the ID is set there.

#3

@jscher2000 thanks for the Bugzilla tip, though I guess I would have to launch Firefox and run the suspect extension first (which as I have mentioned is an issue, if I have to consider that the extension may be taken down by Mozilla for a reason).

Edit: In case of Sidebery, a problem with review is very unlikely since the current version came out in June last year (but if there were such issues with some other extension, I don’t think 404 on add-on page would be an appropriate way to indicate that).

#4

There isn’t integration between the systems, unfortunately.

Another option to extract the info would be to use this tool on my site to pull key data from the extensions.json file in your profile folder:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/extensionsjson.html

This article has the steps to get to your profile folder if you can run Firefox and if you can’t:

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

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#5

“Unfortunately, I forgot to answer the reviewer”, the author comments on Github.

Why is it that a missed response will cause a (supposedly completely fine, since it has been online for months) add-on to be removed from my browser without my consent or even a notice? Why is the directory pretending the add-on had never been there (instead of something more reasonable like adding a warning on the add-on’s page that the author is unresponsive or removing its recommended status)?

Update: Oh yeah, just building the add-on yourself isn’t any help either, no, you need to switch to another version of Firefox as well to allow the installation of unsigned add-ons.

I can understand that you want to protect your users but man, I have better things to do.

I hope you’re going to seriously improve [the transparency of] this process, there are already too many reasons for people to switch away.

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#6

The id of the version I just built is 3c078156-979c-498b-8990-85f7987dd929 and there are no corresponding Bugzilla results.

#7

Considering having it signed, license permitting. https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/self-distribution/