Updating Extensions in FireFox

 

Summary

Mozilla FireFox integrates Extension technology, the ability for users to extend the capabilities of FireFox by creating plugins that alter the behavior or appearance of the application. The Extension Manager function does not work correctly however, as it is unable to correctly find updates for extensions.

Application Description

Mozilla's FireFox is an Internet browser available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. At the time of writing this presentation, FireFox was still pre-1.0 (meaning that it was still a preview release for testing purposes).

Test Design

This example demonstrates the use of Function testing. In Function testing, we evaluate the application by locating and isolating functions, then interacting with the functions and observing how well each can perform its task.

For this presentation, we are looking at the Extension Manager function. This function is one of many functions in the Tools menu of FireFox. The Extension Manager downloads, stores, runs, and updates all of the extensions for the FireFox browser. Therefore, we have downloading, storing, running, and updating of extensions as sub-functions of the Extension Manager. To keep the presentation as simple as possible, let's work with just the Update Extensions sub-function of the Extension Manager.

We expect that the Update Extensions sub-function will do just that: update our extensions.

FireFox comes preinstalled with one extension, the DOM Inspector, which helps identify different file types. To perform this test on your own, you may want to download more extensions to test this function.

Function testing is typically the general testing that is first performed on an application, mostly to verify that everything works in its most basic form (that all of the functions will at least start and operate).

Performing the Test

  1. Open Mozilla FireFox. Occassionaly, you may see the following pop-up window when opening FireFox:

  2. Inside the window is the Rubics Cube that is used by FireFox to signify extensions, so click on the "Click Here to View" link to see what updates are available for our extensions.
  3. Clicking on the link does not do anything, so let's launch the Extension Manager ourselves to perform updates. You can do this by clicking on Tools->Extensions on the top horizontal menu:

  4. The Extension Manager will open, displaying the currently installed extensions:

  5. Next, we will try to update our extensions. Click on the first extension (here, the DOM Inspector), and then click on the 'Update' button:

  6. FireFox checks for updates but encounters an error:

  7. Let's try updating a different extension, since the DOM Inspector did not work. Click on 'Close' to return to the Extension Manager.
  8. Again, select an extension (other than the one we tested last time) and click on the 'Update' button:

Results/Relevance

It appears that we are unable to update any of the extensions. To verify that the error message is not being given to us because there are actually no updates available for the extensions that we have, we can check on the extensions website (by clicking on the "Get More Extensions" link in the Extension Manager). Unfortunately, there were updates for many of the extensions that were in the Extension Manager, so the Update Extensions sub-function is not working correctly.

When we started the browser, we saw the "New Updates Available" message:

It turns out that, despite the pop-up using the Extensions logo, this message applied to updating the browser itself (in this case, from v0.9 to v0.9.1). So, unintentionally, we have located 2 more bugs. The first being that the link to update the browser did not work, and the second being that the pop-up mislead us by using the extensions icon.

Function testing helped us look at the basic functionality of the Update Extensions sub-function of the Extension Manager and establish that it was not working correctly. By doing this, we know that further testing of this sub-function would waste our testing team's time, since this feature does not work at all and needs much more programming dedication before we can effectively test it.

Similar Tests/Additional Notes

According to Mozilla's website, "The Extension Update and Software Update systems have not yet been well tested. You may experience problems. These will be addressed in the 1.0 beta release. As of the time of release, the update service has not been deployed on update.mozilla.org which means updates will not be available. You may see status notifications for available updates when there are none."

Configuration Notes

Testing Mozilla's FireFox v0.9 on:

Created 29 June 2004 for the CSTER

All images and written material ©Copyright Sam Oswald 2004

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305,
USA.