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I think a failed NoScript update on Firefox 4.0 beta 6 (on Win7 x64) caused NoScript to be uninstalled. I'm an experienced IT professional and know my way around computers. I didn't quite witness it happen, but here is what I can tell you:

1) Yesterday, NoScript was installed and working

2) Yesterday evening, playing around with FF 4.0b6, I tried the "Update Add-ons Now" command in the new Add-ons Manager. I was curious: Would I get to confirm the updates? Would the updates be otherwise silent?

3) Add-ons Manager said it was updating, and then it prompted me to restart. There was no indication of of what updated, before or after the restart. I tried looking in "View Recent Updates", and I checked the Last Updated field for each add-on. No clue. I thought it was a bug in FF.

4) Today, I noticed NoScript was missing: Its' not in my status bar, it's not listed in Add-ons Manager, and the directory is missing from my profile (I even checked the install.rdf file of every anonymously named directory).

5) I did find the following in my extensions.log file, in my profile:

2010-09-14 11:26:38 - safeInstallOperation: failed to back up file: [profile path here]\extensions\{73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232}\chrome\noscript.jar to: [profile path here]\extensions\{73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232}-trash\chrome ... rolling back file moves and aborting installation.

2010-09-14 11:26:38 - ExtensionManager:_finishOperations - failure, catching exception - lineno: 1596 - file: undefined - [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIFile.moveTo]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/ff36/components/nsExtensionManager.js :: moveFile :: line 1596" data: no]

2010-09-21 17:02:48 ERROR addons.xpi: Failed to install staged add-on {73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232} in app-profile: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIFile.remove]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: resource://gre/modules/XPIProvider.jsm :: DirInstallLocation_installAddon :: line 5868" data: no]

The first error recurs going back a year or more; I'm not concerned with it, but it does identify the NoScript install directory ("73a6fe31..."). The second error is included for completeness, in case it later turns out to be relevant. Note the first two are a week old. The third error is from yesterday evening, possibly (I'm not sure) when I ran the update. Note that it refers to NoScript's directory, and indicates an install failure. Again, NoScript has been uninstalled. Coincidence?

There was this, new fx 3.7 addon-manager breaks noscript, but whatever you're seeing is likely different, unless there is some sort of related regression?

At the time, I posted about it http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p9421295 including some log entries, http://therube.pastebin.com/W3xexmZk.

I'll leave my browser in it's current, NoScript-less state for a day or so, in case someone wants to troubleshoot, but then I'm going to reinstall. I don't like to have random encounters with websites without protection.

guanxi wrote:I'll leave my browser in it's current, NoScript-less state for a day or so, in case someone wants to troubleshoot, but then I'm going to reinstall. I don't like to have random encounters with websites without protection.

There's no point in keeping it in this state, unless you're willing to file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, since it may be an Add-ons manager bug (definitely not a NoScript one).

Giorgio Maone wrote:There's no point in keeping it in this state, unless you're willing to file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, since it may be an Add-ons manager bug (definitely not a NoScript one).

Hmmm ... "definitely" is a bold word to use about anything technical, but hopefully that's it. If Mozilla's response is that it's a NoScript bug, I'm just going to cross-link the posts and let you sort it out directly ...

You were right, and I'll take my pie a la mode. It's bug 587088 and at least one other NoScript user posted, it looks like for the same update that caught me. Here's the developer's theory:

The process for installing an update is to first delete the files from the old
version, then move the new files into place. The log shows that the first step
failed which means we throw away the update.

I'm guessing though that it actually succeeded to a certain extent, probably
removed all the files from inside the directory and just left the directory in
place due to a file lock. That'd then leave an empty directory so the extension
would appear to be gone (and that directory would get removed on a subsequent
startup).

The old code used to move files aside rather than removing them, we probably
need to re-introduce that for safety here.

Had the same issue where installing Firefox 4 seems to have deleted my NoScript add-on (along with another one called Ghostery).