Installing Coapp in Firefox/Download Helper.

When I installed DownloadHelper extension in Firefox recently, in my Makutu Lindoz distro, I ran into a problem when I tried to install a helper app it had to have in order to operate correctly. So, I installed it. However, when I returned to try to download a video, it again acted like I needed to install the coapp, as they called it. I installed it again, only to have it repeat the problem.

I then went on the Internet to see if other people had this problem and any solutions. I found that down through previous versions of Firefox and DownloadHelper have had this problem for some time. And while several people had suggestions, I couldn’t ever find a solution to the problem. However, I seem to have stumbled upon doing something right, because I fixed my issue and now DownloadHelper works as expected. So I’ll tell you what I did, and hopefully if you retrace my steps, you can fix the issue on your machine as well.

One of the suggestions was to check the permission of the file “net.downloadhelper.coapp.json” which is located in either your home directory or more than likely you’ll find it in:

/usr/lib/mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/net.downloadhelper.coapp.json

But, as I later discovered, that wasn’t the problem. Another suggestion was that it shouldn’t be in the “lib” directory, but in one called “lib64”. However, creating a directory with that name and putting the file in it didn’t fix it either.

While going through all that, I found where the DownloadHelper settings could be accessed: by clicking on the icon for the app in the upper right corner of your Firefox browser window, then click on the gear icon in the bottom right of the window that drops down. Then in the following window, there is a spot where you can see whether the helper app is installed or not. It said it wasn’t installed (even though it was) and hitting its reset button didn’t fix it either.

Then I had an idea. I knew on my main computer running Linux Mint, that Download Helper on Firefox worked just fine. So I did some research on my Mint computer to see how it was set up. I couldn’t find any differences save one: On Mint I had installed 74.0, but the one I installed on Lindoz was 74.0.1. I had installed it through the Software Manager. I checked the Synaptic Package Manager; it had 74.0.1 on it as well. On a hunch, I did the following which has fixed it for now.

1. I uninstalled Firefox on the Software Manager.

2. I then went to a terminal and entered the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

When I went to the settings in DownloadHelper, it now showed the coapp as installed, and when I tested it, it downloaded and converted the file as I expected it would.

I’m not sure how I fixed it. Because it works on the one installed from apt repository as opposed to the repository that Software Manager uses (though I would expect it to be exactly the same program)? Or, could it be that it does better at installing it when Firefox is installed after the coapp is installed? Or some other reason I’ve not considered?

One more note, the file it is looking for to determine whether it is installed or not is:

/opt/net.downloadhelper.coapp/bin/net.downloadhelper.coapp-linux-64

That file was already there with executable privileges; Firefox should be picking it up. All I did to get it working was to uninstall Firefox from the Software Manager (where I had initially installed it) and reinstalled Firefox through the command line. For whatever reason, it worked. Perhaps if you do that, it could solve your problem too. Good luck!