Waterfox: Silently-installed Mozilla addons

[chocolateboy]

Just noticed in Waterfox 56.1.0/Linux (Arch) that the following addons have been silently installed:

• ADB Helper
• Valence

(They may have been installed in an earlier version. The timestamp on the ~/.waterfox/<profile>/extensions/[email protected]/ folder is from February, when I was using 56.0.4.1.)

There's a discussion about them here (I don't remember ever using WebIDE) and a Bugzilla issue here.

They look like they could both be useful (or were), but I'd rather not have addons installed without my consent. If it's really the best option, it feels like the user should, at the very least, be asked or notified, and that this behaviour should be restricted to nightlies and/or developer builds rather than release builds like Waterfox.

[chocolateboy]

According to this post (which is also discussed on the Pale Moon forum), these addons can be (partially?) disabled by setting the following preferences:

pref("devtools.webide.enabled", false)
pref("devtools.webide.autoinstallADBHelper", false)
pref("devtools.webide.autoinstallFxdtAdapters", false)
pref("devtools.webide.autoConnectRuntime", false)

[MrAlex94]

Also I’ve pointed the pref that checks for system add-ons to download to a
blank XML file. Any chance the Linux distro might be force installing them,
like Ubuntu does?

Otherwise I’ll check if they’re on other distros/OS.

On Mon, 9 Apr 2018 at 09:17, chocolateboy [e-mail] wrote:

According to this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10840289,
these addons can be (partially?) disabled by setting the following
preferences:

pref("devtools.webide.enabled", false)pref("devtools.webide.autoinstallADBHelper", false)pref("devtools.webide.autoinstallFxdtAdapters", false)pref("devtools.webide.autoConnectRuntime", false)

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[chocolateboy]

Thanks!

Any chance the Linux distro might be force installing them, like Ubuntu does?

I don't think so. It looks like it's an unmodified build.

[MrAlex94]

I've had a look and can't find these installed on any of my macOS, Windows or Debian systems

[chocolateboy]

If I reset the preferences mentioned above to their defaults, the addons are installed automatically for me in a clean profile as soon as WebIDE is opened e.g. with Shift-F8 (which is probably how I accidentally triggered it).

[MrAlex94]

These add-ons are good supplements for WebIDE. What would be the point in removing them?

[chocolateboy]

AFAICT, WebIDE is obsolete.

These addons can still be installed from the WebIDE GUI by anyone who wants to use them via the following buttons:

• Install ADB Helper
• Install Simulator

The options above just prevent them being secretly/silently installed without the user's consent.

[Peacock365]

Relevant information: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16222

I agree with @chocolateboy by the way. Who wants them may install them manually. No point in having them in every profile, being installed behind our backs.