Hi

Thank you for your question and appreciate what you are trying to do. I have had a look into this in some dept and have spoken to a few fellow contributors, and think I may have an answer which will help.

I cannot find a straightforward way to install an add-on into multiple Firefox profiles. If there was one shared profile, it may be possible as this (technical) document explains.

I got in touch with the Firefox Dev Tools team, and they recommended:

1. Using Firefox Developer Edition. This is a version of Firefox designed for Developers with a suite of developer tools (and a cool dark blue theme), that can be installed by users alongside Firefox as a separate browser for web development. You can download it from here. It is also a pre-Release version of Firefox that can (optionally) provide telemetry to help us make future versions of Firefox even better.

1. In the Firefox you already have, press F12 (in for Windows, similar command probably exists for other operating systems) and the developer tools will open along the bottom of the screen.

I hope that this helps, but if not, please come back here and we can look into a different solution for you. I sincerely hope the class is a success please get in touch if there is anything else we can do to help.

The class requirements say Firebug, while those options may be similar, there will course material handed out, designed for Firebug. Screenshots and step by step written for Firebug, which will be different using those tools.

You can create a specific key in the Windows Registry

• https://developer.mozilla.org/Installing_extensions
• https://developer.mozilla.org/Adding_Extensions_using_the_Windows_Registry

Doesn't appear adding that to the registry works.

I added the proper keys and Firefox doesn't see it.

Can you post the registry keys you added (e.g. paste the exported keys in a reply)?

On a 64 bit Windows version it should be added here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions

The extension's name should be the same as you see in its install.rdf file and if you install the extension in a profile.

Make sure to rename the name part of the extension as well to the ID. I'm not using Firebug, so I don't know its ID (GUID or email).

I tried: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions

Then HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions

Then I tried both, all with a string name as the ID I found in the "install.rdf"

In the RDF file I see too different sections that contain em:id

   
   
     <Description>
       <em:id>toolkit@mozilla.org
       30.0a1
       49.0
     </Description>
   </em:targetApplication>

   
   
     <Description>
       <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
       30.0a1
       49.0
     </Description>
   </em:targetApplication>

I tried both toolkit@mozilla.org and {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384} as the string name

Just saw this section with another em:id and that one works, however firefox say "Firebug could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled"

I'll have to look that up and see if there is a way around that

Looks like you have to go into about:config and change xpinstall.signatures.required to FLASE

Not to find out how to set that to false for all users.

This is ending up to be WAY harder than it should, I am just going to add a shortcut to the addon in the start menu and the students will have to install it manually.

If it was just the registry it would be cake, but there is too much to this.

The firebug ID is in the first section: firebug@software.joehewitt.com

• <em:id>firebug@software.joehewitt.com</em:id>

What you posted above are IDs of the supported target applications.

• {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384} is the Firefox ID