Updated Firefox Extension - Still says "No updates were found."

Question

I am working on a new version of a firefox extension, but after releasing it, and incrementing the em:version in install.rdf and update.rdf, when I click "Find updates" Firefox reports that "No updates were found." When I run it with debugging on, the output in the console is actually identical to what I see when I don't put the update live.

It starts with RDFItemUpdater:checkForUpdates with all of the parameters, and returns with Addon Update Ended and status: 8.

I verified with McCoy tool that the extension is signed, and has the same Id as the old one, etc. I'm not sure what else to try. Any advice would be appreciated. This is with Firefox 3 (and the extension is marked as compatible with it... that didn't change).

Answer 1

Make sure your update.rdf file is being served with an appropriate Content-Type, i.e. text/rdf, text/xml or application/xml+rdf

Answer 2

If you've only recently changed update.rdf, maybe it's cached. Load it in the browser then Shift-Refresh.

Answer 3

here are some nice tips that helped me: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extension_Versioning,_Update_and_Compatibility

but, auto update function will not work if extension is marked "experimental".

Answer 4

There are lots of things to mess up, one of which is installing an extension from AMO and expecting it to update when you change your update.rdf :)

Answer 5

I'm having a similar issue, and think it's due to an invalid rdf file. Did you check that yours parsed with this tool? http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/

Answer 6

I was having the same problem. In my update.rdf, I had a wildcard in my minVersion attribute:

minVersion="3.0.*"

Removing the wildcard fixed the status 8:

minVersion="3.0"

The update works now (console shows status 1). This was using Firefox 3.0.18.

My guess is that status 8 means there was a problem understanding the contents of the file (not necessarily an RDF parsing problem). If your minVersion doesn't have a wildcard, maybe there's an invalid character hiding somewhere.