问题
Previously, I could write an addon for personal usage packed as something.xpi and I clicked on it to install it.
After a while, mozilla introduced xpinstall.signatures.required which you could still get around it.
However, it did not stop stabbing developers who are interested to have a personal addon isolated from the world. Today, only web extensions are working and my XUL based addon is thrown away. The tutorials only talk about temporary installation of a web extension while I want my one runs on firefox forever.
Beside whether I can use web extension to write into files or create a GUI in an independent page, I have a bigger challenge:
How can I install a local web extension permanently without creating a Mozilla account for personal usage?
回答1:
Navigate to the folder where your extension is located. You can build it in the usual way using web-ext:
web-ext build
You can install this ZIP file permanently in Firefox by going to about:addons and dragging this file into the tab.
In order for this to work, you need to set xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config (works only for Nightly and maybe Developer Edition).
回答2:
You need a "blueish" Firefox -- Developer Edition (effectively beta) or Nightly (unstable, updated every night).
You can get them from https://mozilla.org/firefox/channel/desktop/.
Then xpinstall.signatures.required will work again.
(As for permissions--you can create a GUI in a tab or a popup, but I don't think you can do it in a separate window (unless you do a webpage-style popup window). You won't be able to write to arbitrary files anywhere on the system--which is a good thing! You can write to the Downloads folder, and read/write some sort of internal storage, but that may not expose the actual files involved. For more information see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_files.)
回答3:
What you should be looking for is having your extension signed by Mozilla as Unlisted.
See Mixing Listed and Unlisted Add-ons on addons.mozilla.org blog post for an overview.
That way, AMO does not host nor (normally) review your extension; it simply runs some basic automated checks and immediately signs your extension so that it can be privately distributed as an XPI.
回答4:
You can try setting the preference extensions.legacy.enabled (this will only work in Nightly or Dev Edition).
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47363481/install-a-personal-firefox-web-extension-permanently