Adding Multiple FireFox Extensions

Adding FireFox extensions through the GUI one-by-one is, if you ignore memory leaks, one of the browsers most annoying quirks. Fortunately, modern versions of the browser allow you to drop a number of xpi files in to your “extensions” directory and install them as a batch when you start FireFox. Of course you need local copies to do this but that’s where a little bit of perl web spidering comes in…

The hardest part of the process is actually finding where to drop them. If you are using a modern Windows system (2K/ XP+) you’ll find the “extensions” directory under %APPDATA%, which you can display with “echo %APPDATA%” from within cmd.exe. The other catch is that FireFox (and Thunderbird) create a profile name based on random characters. The full path will end up looking something like this: ‘C:\Documents and Settings\dwilson\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default\extensions’

You’ll still be prompted once to install them all (I’ve not dug too deep in to completely silent installs yet) but it’s a lot simpler than the alternative. And a good first step on way path to completely unattended installs.