Extension for Safari Missing

sklein3
The Browser Connector has disappeared from Safari for me.

I am on:
Zotero: 7.0.15
Sequoia 15.5
Safari Version 18.5 (20621.2.5.11.8)


Followed these instructions:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/safari_compatibility

but the extension does not appear:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u8531228/6fse12iqeu6tg2xi06so.jpg

As suggested by this:
https://claremont.libanswers.com/faq/383173
I am not seeing a permissions prompt.

Any ideas?
  • sgv09
    I’m experiencing the same issue. I suspect it might be related to the recent operating system update. :(
  • dstillman
    edited 24 days ago
    There's no general issue with macOS 15.5. Delete Zotero from Applications, restart your computer, redownload Zotero, and start the app once. Then check Safari again.
  • sklein3
    The suggestion does NOT appear to have worked.
  • dstillman
    Open Terminal via Spotlight, paste this in, and press Return:

    pluginkit -mAv | grep Zotero

    What's the output?
  • sklein3
    org.zotero.SafariExtensionApp.SafariExtension(5.0.148) 9C13240C-1F9A-49F8-9540-86D771ED16E4 2025-06-02 13:20:01 +0000 /Applications/Zotero.app/Contents/PlugIns/ZoteroSafariExtension.appex
  • dstillman
    That looks correct.

    You can try running the Zotero 7.1 beta to see if that makes a difference.
  • dstillman
    edited 24 days ago
    Fundamentally, though, the Safari extension system is just really buggy and unstable, so there's not a lot we can do here — again, this isn't any sort of general problem on 15.5. It's possible to scan for registration errors in the Console app when the app is first installed and started, but that gets pretty complicated.

    If you're not able to get it to appear, you should switch to a different browser with a more reliable extension mechanism or wait for another macOS update to fix it. Sorry we don't have a better answer for you.
  • sklein3
    I agree, but the faculty I support prefer Safari and I needed to demonstrate on my computer.

    Nevertheless, after reinstalling a second time, I went to Safari=>Settings=>Extensions and was able to turn it on by clicking the checkbox.

    Thanks for the assist. Appreciated.
  • shinkley
    This has happened to me several times - it's obviously some bug / incompatibility with Safari as above poster said. I'm resigned to just expecting it to disappear every so often, and until I feel like reinstalling Zotero I just use Chrome.
  • wsd1
    I would like to briefly confirm that I have also noticed the disappearance of the Zotero extension in Safari. The extension was previously activated for me, but only in a second Safari profile, which I use explicitly for working with Zotero.

    So far I have not been able to reproduce the reappearance of the extension.
  • dstillman
    There's nothing to confirm. It's a years-old Safari bug — that's why we have a troubleshooting section about it. It's annoying, but in almost all cases it's trivial to fix by deleting/redownloading the app or zipping/deleting/unzipping it and starting it once. If you don't want to deal with this periodically, use a browser with a more reliable extension framework.
  • antoniofortin
    @dstillman Do you have any idea why, if the cause is a bug in Safari, this only happens with the Zotero extension? It stops working within a few days of reinstalling Zotero, but I've never had anything like that happen with any other extension.
  • dstillman
    edited 34 minutes ago
    @antoniofortin: It doesn't happen "within a few days" of reinstalling the app. When it happens, it happens immediately after the Zotero app is updated, and there've been two app updates for macOS in the last week.

    The Zotero Connector for Safari is a Safari App Extension, and that framework may just be buggier than the newer Safari Web Extension framework. (We'd love to make it a Safari Web Extension, which would share more code with the versions for other browsers, but after a number of years Apple still hasn't fixed various bugs in their implementation that we've reported to them.) Or there might be something about the specific way Zotero updates itself that triggers the bug.

    But it's just demonstrably a Safari/macOS bug: when the extension disappears after an app update, you can zip the app in Applications, delete it, unzip it, and then start literally the exact same app, and it will appear again in Safari. You can also reinstall the previous version, upgrade again, and get a different result.

    Every other browser just allows extensions to be installed directly, and none of them have problems like this. But that's not how Apple has decided to do things.
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