Pre-installed Extensions not working anymore

[Andy]

According to the article below, Chromium supports pre-bundled extensions.

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/pre-installed-extensions

I've tried all the methods introduced but none of them worked. Was this feature blocked by purpose or by some bugs? I'm using the latest Chromium.

[Antony Sargent]

Were you using an official Google Chrome branded build that you downloaded from https://www.google.com/chrome/ ? Or a version of chromium build from source by yourself or from the chromium continuous build archive? If it's chromium and not Google Chrome, it's possible you need to substitute "Chromium" in the places where those instructions say "Google/Chrome"

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[Andy]

I'm using Chromium built from the source code. I've tried to replace Google/Chrome with Chromium or Google/Chromium. Neither them worked. Any idea?

[Antony Sargent]

What OS (win/mac/linux) were you using, and what revision did you build from? 

[Andy]

I've tried on both Windows 7 (Registry) and Macbook Air (preferences) and none of them worked. The Chromium version is Chromium  53.0.2768.0 dev version 64 bit.

[daniel Amsalem]

Hi,

Please do not send me e-mails, it's a mistake I do not know you, thank you,

Daniel

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[Antony Sargent]

I was able to get it to work using this version of chrome from the continuous built archive that was build around the time that the DEPS file for 53.0.2768.0 was branched. 

https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Win_x64/399800/

But, I had to amend the registry path slightly:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Google\Chrome\Extensions\[id of your extension crx]

as recommended here. Note that using Google\Chrome still works for Chromium builds - sorry I didn't remember this when I saw your initial email; it took me playing around with it myself to jog my memory. 

This is a little confusing - lazyboy@ and scottmg@ and I had some discussion about this on a recent code review here:

https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/1495403002/diff/160001/chrome/browser/extensions/external_registry_loader_win.cc#newcode206

I think there has been some confusion in the past about whether it's the 32/64-bitness of the installer program writing the entries or that of chrome that should count, or perhaps this is just a legacy of when chrome was only 32-bit even on 64-bit windows, and we've ended up in the situation where we might break existing consumers if we change it. 

[Antony Sargent]

BTW, I've just updated the instructions at https://www.chromium.org/administrators/pre-installed-extensions to mention the need for using Wow6432Node in the registry path on 64-bit windows. 

[Andy]

Thanks a lot Antony.  You are amazing!  Can you also look into "master_preferences" for Mac ? We need both Windows and Mac versions. Since Mac doesn't have the registry, we have to use "master_preferences". It is not working at moment.

[Lovense Support]

Yes I did try and actually tried again for Mac. Still no luck :(

[Andy]

1.”Both ways support installing an extension hosted at an update_URL. On Windows and Mac, the update_URLmust point to the Chrome Web Store where the extension must be hosted.”

Question:If update_URL is not a Chrome Web Store URL but our own server, would it work?

2.”For all users: /Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/External Extensions/“

Question:We've tried putting into the three locations as below:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/ 

~/Library/Application Support/Chromium 

~/Library/Application Support/Chromium/Default

none of them had the External Extensions folder. I then created the External Extensions folder and added preferences file. It doesn't work

[Andy]

Managed to get it working on Mac just now. The reason it didn't work was because it took a while to download the file from the external_update_url. There seem to be no way to pre-bundle it on Mac computers. Instead of downloading from our server, is there anyway to bundle it into the package?

[Andy]

There is another thing I've noticed. When I properly configured the registry, Chromium will pick up it at startup. However, the Chromium doesn't really install the extension but instead putting a warning icon. The users would have to click on the warning icon to activate the extension. Is there anyway to have the extension installed automatically without getting the user to click?

[Antony Sargent]

If the computers where you want to do the install are owned by you or under your administrative control (eg an internal LAN, a corporate or academic institution, etc.) there is enterprise policy available which can be used to force-install extensions with no activation confirmation and no option to uninstall:

http://dev.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#Extensions (see "ExtensionInstallForcelist")

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/windows-quick-start

https://www.chromium.org/administrators/mac-quick-start

However, just as a warning, enterprise policy is not to be used for force-installing extensions on individual consumer's computers that aren't owned/managed by you, and any use of enterprise policy in such cases may be a violation of our unwanted software policy and could result in your extension being removed from the chrome web store and/or your binaries/websites being flagged by safe browsing. 

[Andy]

We need to customized lots of things on Chromium. We plan to write a few Chrome extensions and distribute together with Chromium to our customers. That why we need to pre-install those extensions during the installation process. The end users are individual consumers but not enterprise customers. Are there any solution for us with Chromium ?

[Antony Sargent]

If you're distributing your own browser binaries based on the chromium source, you can generally customize things however you want, including changing the code to directly install extensions instead of doing the warning first. You'll probably want to figure out the right way to customize the build process so that it uses your product's name instead of Chromium, and I think that will likely take care of customizing the path to the user preferences directories where you'd want to drop the preference based config files for extension install, so as not to conflict with the official "Google Chrome" or open source "Chromium".