Document Firefox web extension upgrade issues and solutions
Background
Firefox changed the way that settings are stored in extensions beginning with Firefox 57. As a result, Adblock Plus had to migrate it's settings from one format to another between versions 2.8.2 and 3.0.0. And users who upgrade from below 2.8.2 to 3.0.0 or above will lose their settings as a result.
There are about 1.5 million daily active users (about 3 million monthly active users) who are currently using a version of Adblock Plus less than 2.9.x. We do not know why these users have not upgraded. Since auto-upgrade is enabled by default in Firefox, we can speculate that they have {1: Intentionally not upgraded, 2: Disabled auto-upgrade and Forgotten to upgrade manually, or 3: Are using a managed system that has not been upgraded for them yet}.
It is possible to avoid this loss of settings by manually installing Adblock Plus 2.9.1, waiting at least 60 seconds, and then upgrading to the latest 3.x versions.
We would like to document this issue and it's solution on adblockplus.org and notify potentially affected users.
Technical details
Older versions of Adblock Plus can be downloaded here. Links and versions below are restricted to those publicly available on addons.mozilla.org.
All versions equal to or below 2.8.2 will lose settings if upgraded directly to 3.0.0 or greater.
We recommend manually upgrading 2.9.1 and waiting 60 seconds before upgrading to the latest 3.x version.
The upgrade to 2.9.1 must be performed manually via the installer provided on addons.mozilla.org.
The upgrade to >= 3.x can be performed manually via addons.mozilla.org or adblockplus.org or via the usual Firefox extension upgrade procedure (which can be performed via the addons settings page).
If the user has already upgraded from less than or equal to 2.8.2 to greater than or equal to 3.0.0 then the above solution (manually upgrading, waiting, and then upgrading again) will not work. We have not found a solution to this issue yet.
There are two releases of Firefox that are common today:
- Firefox Quantum (currently 58.0.2)
- Firefox ESR (currently 52.6.0)
Adblock Plus 2.9.1 works with Firefox 51.0.x to 56.x (ESR).
Adblock Plus 3.0.0 works with Firefox 51.x or later (ESR and Quantum).
There are some features available in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 that were/are not available in 3.0.0 or later because of time and/or technical limitations. We are continuously migrating, adding, and improving features in 3.x (e.g. the new options page was released with 3.0.0).
If a user relies on features available in 2.9.1 on ESR that are not yet available in 3.x then it may be advisable not to upgrade to the latest version of Adblock Plus yet. However, we are hesitant to recommend this broadly because their may be other issues with 2.9.1 that are or will be resolved in later versions (in addition to new and/or improved features).
Relevant links
- Original bug report
- Discourse post
- The plan towards offering Adblock Plus for Firefox as a Web Extension (blog post)
- Adblock Plus browser add-on gets comfy with Firefox 57 (blog post)