Brave-browser: Chrome web store extensions not updating in RC 0.55.18

[pjv]

Description

Extensions installed from the chrome web store do not update.

Steps to Reproduce

1. install an extension at some time in the past (you might need a time machine for this, but if you have installed extensions in the past, you might not)
2. try to update the extension to the latest version (in the extensions window with developer switch turned on you can click the update button).

Actual result:

the browser shows a message that says "extensions updated" but the extensions are not updated to the latest version available on the chrome web store.

Expected result:

extensions updated to the latest version.

Reproduces how often:

always.

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave | 0.55.18 Chromium: 70.0.3538.67 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Revision | 9ab0cfab84ded083718d3a4ff830726efd38869f-refs/branch-heads/3538@{#1002}
OS | Mac OS X

Reproducible on current release:

• Does it reproduce on brave-browser dev/beta builds?
  yes - same on beta and dev
• Does it reproduce on browser-laptop?
  muon? No extensions there

Website problems only:

• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Shields?
  no
• Is the issue reproducible on the latest version of Chrome?
  no

Additional Information

here is a pastebin example for the net-internals transaction of trying to update a particular extension (krypton authenticator). When i installed it, the current version was 1.0.9 and that is the version that i still have in brave. The current version as of this issue date on the chrome web store is 1.0.14.

[pjv]

Still not updating in RC v. 55.20 and also in beta 56.5.
It looks like the developer channel v. 57.2 did update.

[cryogenn]

Thanks for reporting this @pjv , I am new to Brave and was losing my mind as to what I could be missing that I can't update an extension or two. So thankfully they are aware and will release a fix.

[pjv]

just keeping tabs here. 55.22 still not updating. ~56.6~ 56.7 still not updating.
has the issue been identified?

[tomlowenthal]

No, we haven't investigated or confirmed this issue yet.

[diracdeltas]

@kjozwiak this seems like a high impact issue. could QA please try to repro it?

[kjozwiak]

@kjozwiak this seems like a high impact issue. could QA please try to repro it?

Sure, we'll take a look and see if we can repro. Any idea's where we could get an outdated extension? I don't think anyone on our team has a time machine/VM instance with older extensions installed.

[pjv]

Sure, we'll take a look and see if we can repro. Any idea's where we could get an outdated extension? I don't think anyone on our team has a time machine/VM instance with older extensions installed.

put out the word on the brave forum, twitter, etc. that you need to test this and ask anyone that develops chrome extensions that are distributed through the chrome web store to let you know before they are going to release an update. Install that extension before the update.

...or, create your own do-nothing extension (there must be a hello world example from google somewhere) and get it into the store. Then you can update at will.

...also, check with all brave devs and see if any of them have ever installed an extension from the store. Chances are, if they have and if this issue is not specific to me (and @cryogenn), that if they look through their installed extensions they'll find some that are behind the version currently available on the store.

[Jacalz]

I can confirm that this is an issue with 0.55.22! I have Bitwarden installed and they recently released a new update to their chrome extension. Below are two pictures to show it:


I hope this helps 👍

[pjv]

56.12 still not updating.

[pjv]

thanks for weighing in on this issue @diracdeltas, i agree this seems like a fairly high-impact issue. For me personally, availability and auto-updating of chrome extensions is one of the two significant reasons that i am interested in using brave at all.

I've had a look through the list of 35 open issues (at present) labeled P2 and though I'm obviously biased as the reporter of this issue, I'd say that there are definitely a lot of significant issues on that list, but this one seems like a bigger deal to me than roughly 75% of them.

And, my intuition is that this is probably a low hanging fruit kind of problem. There is probably a pretty simple, single point of logic / configuration that is blocking these updates somewhere in the pipeline and once a dev has a reproducible test case and looks at the network internals involved in updating extensions in vanilla chromium vs. brave, i bet it takes them less than an afternoon to find and fix it.

[diracdeltas]

@pjv thanks for the net-internals log, that was very helpful. this might fix it: https://github.com/brave/go-update/pull/9

luckily it is a server-side only change so once it is merged, people with existing builds should see extensions starting to update if this actually fixes the issue

[pjv]

luckily it is a server-side only change so once it is merged, people with existing builds should see extensions starting to update if this actually fixes the issue

@diracdeltas i wondered if that might be the case. So how do we expedite getting that patch QA'd and pushed into production so i can start really using brave?

[diracdeltas]

@pjv the patch is merged, waiting on devops to deploy it now

[pjv]

My extensions updated. Yay!

[kjozwiak]

Thanks for the confirmation @pjv, really appreciate your help on this 👍