option to disable WebSockets in general or at least for AddOn updates

mathias.walter

I'm behind a corporate/governmental firewall which does SSL scanning. Zotero works so far, after I installed the new root certificates. But update of AddOns does not work. I got the errors reported with D710489973 and 263001031.
I know that WebSockets are not supported by the central firewall and will not be supported in the near future.
Is there an option to disable WebSockets, at least for AddOn updates?

--
Kind regards,
Mathias

dstillman

That wouldn't have anything to do with WebSockets. (Zotero uses WebSockets for faster auto-sync and style/translator updates, but they're optional and not used for add-on updates. I can explain how to disable the attempts if you want, but it doesn't particularly matter.)

You're still getting this error for add-on updates:

Certificate issuer is not built-in.

Zotero is based on Firefox, and I believe Firefox applies stricter security settings for add-on updates by default, such that they won't install if there's a custom CA.

No idea if this will work, but try going to the Config Editor in the Advanced pane of the preferences, right-click, New → Boolean, set extensions.install.requireBuiltInCerts as the preference name, and set the value to true. Then restart Zotero and try again.

mathias.walter

Thanks for the answer. Unfortunately, setting extensions.install.requireBuiltInCerts to true did not help. I still get "Certificate issuer is not built-in."

There is another error claimed as warning: "WARN Download of https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/releases/download/v5.0.9/zotfile-5.0.9-fx.xpi failed: 302 Found".

HTTP 302 just means redirection. Can't Zotero deal with it?

Please also tell me how to disable the WebSockets attempts. That would cleanup the logging as well.

--
Regards,
Mathias

dstillman

HTTP 302 just means redirection. Can't Zotero deal with it?

In general, sure, but that's likely just a manifestation of the same issue, since ZotFile obviously updates fine for most people. ZotFile uses an HTTP URL + hash instead of HTTPS for its update URL, so unlike the other extensions that use GitHub for everything, its update manifest isn't affected by this issue, but the download still is, and I suspect it's just giving a less precise error for that part.

I've created an issue to track this, though I don't know when we'll get to it. For now, I'm afraid you'll need to update add-ons manually.

Please also tell me how to disable the WebSockets attempts.

Set extensions.zotero.streaming.enabled to false. If your network gains WebSockets support, don't forget to re-enable that in order to get faster auto-syncs and translator/style updates.

mathias.walter

I could solve the issue by setting extensions.update.requireBuiltInCerts to false. I comment it at the issue. Thanks for your help.

mathias.walter

BTW: Zotero is much faster now because it does not have to wait for Websockets to timeout. :-)

dstillman

What do you think is faster? Failing WebSocket connections shouldn't have any impact on performance. It's just a few failed HTTP requests that quickly back off to minutes between attempts.

mathias.walter

Thas was maybe a misobservation caused by older add-ons like betterbibtex. I quickly tested it with extensions.zotero.streaming.enabled set to true and false and do not see/feel any difference anymore.

emilianoeheyns

Older in what sense? BBT is updated regularly. BBT just had an update that should improve startup, and BBT should not really have any significant performance effect when not editing items.

mathias.walter

At the top of this discussion I reported that I could not update add-ons automatically. Hence, BBT was not updated regularly. You may also remember the issue https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1087 which I have greated and later linked to this discussion.
After solving this issue (by setting requireBuiltInCerts to false) I could update BBT and it looks like I take benefit from the recent update. :-)

emilianoeheyns

Right - I thought you meant you were still seeing performance problems with bbt. That's something I'd want to know about.