22.04: cannot get gnome shell extensions to work

[Ramaddan]

Hi,

I am pitching in here just in case someone gets this problem

I was using the snap version of Firefox in Ubuntu 24.04

I first installed the gnome-browser-connector package from the repos

For Ubuntu 24.04, the older chrome-gnome-shell package has been depreciated

I installed the suggested Gnome Shell Integration extension from the gnome website

A webextensions security warning poped-up and asked me to allow, which I tried to do

But even though tried, it did not seem to work, then this is where the frustration follows

It still carried on and installed the extension, and I was also asked by a Firefox pop-up to allow the extension, which I did

The firefox permissions should not be confused with the previous pop-up that is linked to outside of firefox, which I took a while to understand

At this point, even though the extension was installed, and given full permission in Firefox, nothing on earth could get it to work

Making a new account fixed this, but I did not want to lose my old account, and just wanted to test with a new account to confirm whether it was a local user settings problem

After confirming this, I tried to remove different folders one at a time (after backing it up), trying to let it repopulate the folder

Of course, I started with all the usual suspects, like the snap folder, .gnome folder, .config folder, .local folder, and just got desperate and did everything, one at a time

Nothing worked........ which was just weird, and I would like someone to explain this to me.

Maybe needed reboot or re-login which I did not do?

I was pretty sure at this point that it was a settings problem, because of the above and due to the facts that other extensions that required such a permission were working.

In either case, I finally came across people talking about how the settings for this webextensions pop-up were all stored in flatpak

Why flatpak??? I thought it was a snap package...

In either case, I started looking more into these permissions that are set in flatpak, and this is where I finally started to see the light

You can type the following to see the permission set for each extension in snap firefox by webextensions in a terminal

flatpak permissions webextensions

You will get something like this, depending on how many extensions you have installed that requires native messaging:

Table Object App Permissions Data
webextensions org.keepassxc.keepassxc_browser snap.firefox yes 0x00
webextensions firefoxpwa snap.firefox yes 0x00
webextensions snap.firefox 0x00
webextensions org.gnome.chrome_gnome_shell snap.firefox no 0x00

Here was the culprit!

The permission for the gnome extension was set to no

It does not matter if everything in firefox was permitted, that only means you are telling firefox it can let the info go out of firefox

On the other side, there is a handler that needs to receive this info that will deal with the communication between the isolated snap package, and the gnome interface

These are the settings we just saw!

There are two ways to deal with this.

First make sure you remove the extension for each command you try, and exit firefox.

A simple and straightforward way would be with the following command you input into a terminal:

flatpak permission-set webextensions org.gnome.chrome_gnome_shell snap.firefox yes

And you can run the previous command to check that the permission has changed to yes

No matter how many times you remove the extension from firefox, it will not remove the permission settings in flatpak, because it is outside firefox.

The second way to deal with this is to reset the permission altogether in flatpak, to make sure that the permission dialog is working:

flatpak permission-remove webextensions org.gnome.chrome_gnome_shell snap.firefox

When you try to install the extension once again, the webextensions dialog should ask you to allow the extension

As a side note, I think the developers can add some type of GUI addition that can make it easy to reach these specific permission set by the webextensions dialog

And to have some note somewhere, telling people to look into this GUI interface, if their extensions are not working

I hope this helps someone and saves them from a lot of grief!