All add-ons / extensions break randomly and are disabled (the icon of the extensions is also broken under "Manage Your Extensions")
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This thread is for the search function, as I found some VERY old and outdated suggestions for the aforementioned issue using the search function.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)
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.