As many of you may know already Mozilla is dropping NPAPI support from Firefox. This change was announced more than an year ago and finally all NPAPI plugins except Adobe Flash are banned in nightly Firefox builds.

Firefox 52 will be first version with GNOME Shell integration NPAPI plugin hard disabled.

For those who still want to use Firefox for managing GNOME Shell extensions there is NPAPI plugin replacement ready: GNOME Shell integration for Chrome (chrome-gnome-shell).

You should not be confused by it’s name because chrome-gnome-shell supports all major browsers: Google Chrome/Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera and Firefox.

The words “for Chrome” in project’s name means “for Chrome extensions capable browsers” and recent versions of Firefox supports own implementation of “Chrome extensions API“: WebExtensions.

Currently, Firefox supported only in git master branch of chrome-gnome-shell, however first chrome-gnome-shell’s release with Firefox support will be published on Jan 4, 2017 and will have version 8.

Unlike NPAPI plugin chrome-gnome-shell consists of 2 parts: browser extension and helper application written in Python: native host messaging connector.

Firefox extension can be installed from addons.mozilla.org.

As for native host connector – it should be installed separately, preferably using your distro’s package manager. Currently, packages are prepared for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu. Packages with Firefox support will be available shortly after Jan 4, 2017.

Have problems with or questions about chrome-gnome-shell? Look to the chrome-gnome-shell’s wiki page.

Feel free to ping me on irc (my nickname is nE0sIghT on GIMPNet) or fill new ticket at Github or at bugzilla.gnome.org.

Update:

GNOME Shell integration for Chrome version 8 with Firefox support released