Firefox: find location of specific add-on/extension?

Question

I'm using Firefox 5, and I already know that extensions are situated in the extensions subfolder of the Profile folder... However, I need to find where is a particular extension (say, CoLT) located; the problem is that most of the extension folders are named by guid, e.g.

extensions$ ls
{232ac1d3-4d70-4919-8338-48c3d3f98afc}
{29c4afe1-db19-4298-8785-fcc94d1d6c1d}
{2bfc8624-5b8a-4060-b86a-e78ccbc38509}
{33f141c0-3703-4a4c-b459-cec618a7dafd}
...

Then again: "Starting in Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4 / Thunderbird 3.3 / SeaMonkey 2.1) , XPI files are no longer unpacked when extensions are installed. Instead, the XPI itself is placed in the extensions directory, and files are loaded directly out of the package." (Extension Packaging - MDN Docs)...

And since XPI is basically a ZIP archive, grepping through the extensions folder looking for, say, the extension name:

extensions$ grep -ri 'colt' .

... will return nothing.

So, does anyone know of a method (or an extension) to tell me exactly which XPI (or unpacked folder) is a particular extension located in/loaded from?

I know you already got answers a long time ago, just would like to add a comment about zgrep. Don't know about your system - on my Cygwin, gzip package also includes zgrep, which it's a simple wrapper script around grep for allowing grepping inside zip files. In your example, zgrep -i 'colt' * would do the job. To do the same as you, I usually zgrep as I said, then grep -ir --include=install.rdf 'colt' *, so I can check for both uncompressed and compressed extensions. Of course, the about:support answer is much easier, this way would only be better if you need that on a script. — Charles Roberto Canato

Wladimir Palant Wladimir Palant · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-05T08:42:56

Type about:support#extensions-tbody into your location bar - this will list (among other things) all your installed extensions along with their IDs. The extension ID determines the folder/file name in the extensions directory. Note that extensions aren't always installed in your profile - if in doubt, contents of extensions.ini in your Firefox profile should clear things up.

If you want to have it more "comfortable" you can paste the following code into the Browser Console:

var {AddonManager} = Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/AddonManager.jsm", null);
AddonManager.getAllAddons().then(addons => {
    for (let addon of addons.filter(addon => addon.type == "extension"))
        console.log(addon.name, addon.getResourceURI().spec);
});

This will use add-on manager API to display the names and install locations of all your add-ons.

Firefox: find location of specific add-on/extension?

2 Answers