Can't get firefox extension to work for all users

Question

I am using a RHEL 64 bit system. I successfully have been able to install the Firefox extension, configure and use it with root. However, it will not work when I log into as a standard user. I am using firefox 45.1.

I have put the information in /usr/lib64/firefox/browser/extensions but I cant seem to make it work.

This system isn't on a network which causes more challenges.

Answer 1

First, you shouldn't use Firefox - or X Windows at all - as root as it's a security vulnerability. These applications are meant to be run with non-administrative privileges, in which case any bug or flaw in them would cause limited damage to your system.

To answer your question:

If you're putting together an installer that needs to be able to install extensions for a toolkit-based application, such as Firefox or anything using XULRunner, Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3) introduces an easy way to do this for Windows, OS X and Linux. Windows users have also had the ability to install extensions using the registry for some time. Now, on OS X and Linux, you can simply copy the extension into a predefined directory on the user's computer.

To install extensions into these directories you must extract the extension to a directory with the same name as the the extension's ID. The ID is defined in the install.rdf of the extension, between the <em:id></em:id> tags. For WebExtensions based add-ons the ID is the value of the applications.gecko.id property within the manifest.json file.

To install an extension to be used by all users on Linux, copy it to:

/usr/lib/<vendor>/extensions/<appid>/

Or...

/usr/lib64/<vendor>/extensions/<appid>/

Or...

/usr/share/<vendor>/extensions/<appid>/

To install an extension just for a specific user:

~/.<vendor>/extensions/<appid>/

(Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Installing_extensions)