Question

Since updated to Firefox 12, every time I launch Firefox with a particular profile with Selenium (in python and Mac OS 10.7) it pops up the “checking compatibility of add-ons” dialog, and sometimes this dialog would stay up forever and I have to force-quit it. After forcing quit it, a new instance of the Firefox would continue to launch and finishes the rest of the Selenium script successfully though.

I have tried setting extensions.checkCompatibility to false. This fixed it if I launched Firefox normally, but not if I launch it with Selenium. Any idea on how to suppress this dialog? Thanks!

Answer 1

This dialog is shown only once whenever Firefox is updated. The reason it is shown each time for you is probably that Selenium creates a new profile each time. If you set extensions.lastAppVersion preference to "12.0" (or whatever the current Firefox version is) then Firefox will no longer think that it has been updated and won’t show this dialog. However, it should be easier to add a extensions.showMismatchUI preference and set it to false, this will suppress this dialog (but not the other upgrade actions).

Side-note: extensions.checkCompatibility preference no longer does anything starting with Firefox 3.6, it is a version-specific preference in the current Firefox versions. So you would have to set extensions.checkCompatibility.12.0 preference instead. That disables compatibility checking for extensions completely however, not just the dialog you are concerned about.