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All add-ons / extensions break randomly and are disabled (the icon of the extensions is also broken under "Manage Your Extensions")

ff_user
ff_user
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Sometimes all add-ons / extensions break randomly and are disabled (the icon of the extensions is also broken under "Manage Your Extensions").

The extensions are visible under "about:addons", but the slider is turned off and the icon in front of each extension is broken / empty.

It seems that deleting these 2 files- compatibility.ini and extensions.json inside the firefox profile folder, usually fixes the issue. Only these 2 files though, don't delete anything else.

No need to mess around with the ff profiles or anything else, just deleting those 2 files and restarting the firefox usually fixes the issue with the "unregistered" addons.

This thread is for the search function, as I found some VERY old and outdated suggestions for the aforementioned issue using the search function.

I wonder what causes the extensions to "unregister" randomly.

Sometimes all add-ons / extensions break randomly and are disabled (the icon of the extensions is also broken under "Manage Your Extensions"). The extensions are visible under "about:addons", but the slider is turned off and the icon in front of each extension is broken / empty. It seems that deleting these 2 files- compatibility.ini and extensions.json inside the firefox profile folder, usually fixes the issue. Only these 2 files though, don't delete anything else. No need to mess around with the ff profiles or anything else, just deleting those 2 files and restarting the firefox usually fixes the issue with the "unregistered" addons. This thread is for the search function, as I found some VERY old and outdated suggestions for the aforementioned issue using the search function. I wonder what causes the extensions to "unregister" randomly.

All Replies (1)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Hmm, I haven't heard of this before. How often are you seeing it?

Some thoughts:

(1) Many paths in the file are specific to your current Windows username and Firefox profile (they use absolute paths), so swapping extensions.json files between users/profiles can cause breakage.

Is there any process on your computer that might be replacing the extensions.json file with an older/different version?

Do you ever sign in to Windows using a different user name, or do you locate your profile on a mapped drive?

(2) Has your security software reported trying to clean a threat from the extensions.json file, corrupting the format in the process?

(3) Do you suspect any malware trying to force a malicious extension into the file to trick Firefox into installing it, corrupting the format in the process?

For further investigation of #2 or #3, it would be useful to keep a clean backup version of file to compare with the broken version the next time this happens.