Side-loading and unlisted addons clarifications

Hi,

its not 100% clear to me when an addon is considered to be side-loaded, in particular for unlisted addon’s. I couldn’t find any details of the ‘web install’ procedure thats mentioned on the various blog posts and wiki pages concerning the signing of addons.

So to clarify, lets say I have an addon that is not listed on amo and I provide a public URL where this addon can be downloaded. This addon is a companion to an application, the installer for that application launches Firefox with the public URL to start a registration process. The user sees and still has to accept the installation of the addon this way as far as I understood, its just initiated by the installer.

Is this considered side-loading? If it is considered side-loading, then I assume the only way for having an unlisted not-side-loaded addon that works closely together with an application would be to have the installer ask the user to go to a website and load the plugin from there (from inside Firefox)? Would the installer be allowed to start the Firefox process for this?

This is not considered side-loading.

An add-on is side-loaded when a local installer installs an add-on that is included in the installer directly.

Thanks for the reply. Just to make sure I understand all the options:

Shipping the signed plugin with the installer/application but still letting Firefox go through the installation process by simply launching Firefox with the local plugin file as argument is already considered side-loading right?

I’m not sure about that, adding @jorgev for clarification.

Launching Firefox with the local file should trigger the normal local install (I think?). In that case, you wouldn’t need side-loading privileges. Of course, the best way to figure it out is just trying it.

Ah, it wasn’t clear to me that the resulting xpi will enforce a non-side-loading scenario after reading the blog posts and agreement. So yeah, I’ll just try it out, thanks for the hint.