Firefox 69 required? (No ESR compatibility)

[Jake1702]

Hi, is there a reason why on Mozilla's addon page it reports Firefox 69 is required? I am on 60.9.0esr and I am going to update to one of the 68 ESR branches, however even then it will be one version behind. I don't currently have any intention to get off the ESR branch. Is there a specific reason why the extension needs Firefox 69? (No ESR equivalent of that)

[lidel]

Thank you for raising this issue.
There are two pieces to this puzzle:

Why the latest release requires Firefox 69?

Firefox 69 shipped important fix for a painful bug around CORS, XHR and WebExtensions.

This meant we finally could remove Firefox-specific workarounds, and use the same code as in Chrome and save bandwidth and speed up things a bit.

More details in #771 (and #494 + #436).

Why addons.mozilla.org reports Firefox 69 is required and blocks the install?

This looks like a bug in the addons website.
IIUC it should detect ESR and provide an older-but-compatible version.

We have the same problem on Android, where latest version is still 68.x.
I commented in this upstream issue, hopefully it will get addressed soon.

Potential workaround for ESR users

This situation impacts around 9% of Firefox users who use ESR.

@Jake1702 until this is addressed upstream, try to manually install v2.8.5 from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companion/versions/:

Let me know if that worked.

[lidel]

Hi @Jake1702, I think you should be able to use v2.9.0.860 (Beta) on ESR now (switched min. version to 68).
We will land this to stable channel later this week, and be much more diligent about keeping ESR compatibility going forward.