Remove AddOns without Remove-Button
I need to remove an unwanted, disabled extension.
It seems that if a third party meets a few criteria it is allowed to install an extension anyway - if you ignore the Firefox warning it is installed as 'disabled' with NO remove button.
Seems like a security risk waiting to happen, other browsers e.g. Chrome give the browser the final say in if it is installed, imho the correct pattern and something that should be in Firefox.
If any know how to remove and extension without a remove button I would be grateful.
Have been with Firefox as my default this but this is probably the last straw.
All Replies (2)
Extensions are options you install into Firefox, They can be removed at will. Plugins are from programs that Firefox finds already on your system.
An extension without a Remove button is really a plugin. The only way to remove a plugin is to remove its program from your system. However, you can disable extensions and plugins if you want.
Firefox doesn't display a Remove button for an extension if it was installed into a "shared" location. Often in that case, there is an entry in the Windows Control Panel, Uninstall a Program, which lets you remove it. You can click the Installed on column heading to sort by date and see whether you can spot it based on the approximate install date.
If that doesn't work, there is a somewhat arduous way to discover the location of an extension on disk so you can remove it.
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing your settings files.
Scroll down and find extensions.json and make a copy somewhere convenient, such as your Documents folder. You can close out of the Windows Explorer window after that.
Back in Firefox, open that copy of extensions.json in Firefox's "Scratchpad" tool as follows. Launch the Scratchpad from the Developer menu, either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Developer > Scratchpad
- (menu bar) Tools > Web Developer > Scratchpad
Use the Open button on the Scratchpad's toolbar to open the backup copy of extensions.json and then click the Pretty Print button on the toolbar to re-layout the data in a more readable format.
Then use Find (Ctrl+f) to search for some part of the name of the unwanted extension, and you should see various information about it. The descriptor gives its location on disk. (The \ in Windows folder paths is doubled in this file due to the way it is processed. When exploring your disk, read \\ as \.)
Can you track it down?
Note: you don't need to save the changes to the file when you exit unless you want to keep the "pretty" version for future reference.