Knowledge Base

I don't have a good story today. I was a few months behind on my Librewolf releases, so I wanted to work on that. So last week I got 154.0.1 packaged.

And today I finally installed it, and then I learned the settings panel is completely empty! It's broken. But the app compiles and operates. I needed to tweak some settings, and I couldn't find them in about:config, so I wanted to use the about:preferences. It's only broken in my build, which I'm sure has something to do with my debianized-firefox+librewolf-patches process.

So in the meantime, I downgraded back to 150.0.1 and restored my browser profile from backup (that I take monthly). But my browser had deleted the extensions for passkeys, and I need passkeys unfortunately. So I had to go find those again. Apparently, the files had been deleted from the profile directory. It was shockingly hard to get ahold of the .xpi files directly; the Firefox extensions website really wants to have the browser use the file rather than letting you download it: "The appification of stuff" instead of letting a power user download the file and use it.

When I was able to have it try to use the file (begrudgingly directly from the website), the browser said it was corrupted and would not work. So it didn't even save the file anywhere.

I started panicking, because I absolutely need a passkey for certain sites. They would not let me log in with a password.

Remember, this was the previous version of the browser that had worked 1.5 hours ago before updating.

I reset my browser profile to fresh and tried the extensions again; I can just import my history and bookmarks if I have to. Unfortunately, it still thought the files were corrupted. So I started investigating those. I eventually found a way to "install addons temporarily" which showed me one error message.

Internal error: Invalid string format contentSecurityPolicySandbox

Well, that string didn't exist anywhere in these xpi files, and also I hadn't changed any settings about that. Even a fresh 150.0.1 profile malfunctioned too.

I started poking at the patches (more) to see if anything was related to that string, and I couldn't find anything.

For some reason, when I blanked the profile a second time, then I could install the extensions again. And then when I restored my backup of the browser profile, all of a sudden it was back, with the extensions working.

So for now, everything is working for me again, but on an old version of the browser.

And I still have to fix the debianized librewolf build process so that the settings page works. I don't know what level of effort that will take. I don't want to give up on debianizing librewolf. I'm sure the Debian people have good reasons to debianize Firefox, and I want that, plus the librewolf bits.