Adblock Plus 2.9 broken in Thunderbird

[tibitts]

Environment

Linux OpenSUSE 13.2 32-bit, Thunderbird 52.1.1, ABP 2.9
filter lists: Easy Privacy + Easy List, Easy List Germany, Facebook Privacy List, Fanboys Social Blocking List, Malware Domains, Adblock Warming Removal List, Prebake - Filter Obtrusive Cookie Notices

How to reproduce

Reading articles from a RSS news feed, doesn't matter which one, as long as there are ads

Observed behaviour

Suddenly ads did appear in the articles. Upon checking the filter list subscriptions - they were all gone.
Even though the filter subscriptions can be re-created, they will be lost again after Thunderbird is restarted.
Reverting to ABP 2.8.2 restores the filter subscriptions.

Expected behaviour

Filter subscriptions should not be lost.
Is this already the point were Thunderbird doesn't cope any more with the changes in preparation for web extensions?
If that's the case, ABP 2.9 shouldn't be marked as compatible with Thunderbird any longer.

[tibitts]

Platform should be Thunderbird, not Firefox.

[hansenjo]

I have the same problem on macOS 10.12.5 with Thunderbird 52.1.1 and ABP 2.9. ABP loses all the filter lists on restart. It doesn't matter which lists, even custom rules are affected. One can re-add them, but they aren't presistent between restarts. Reverting to ABP 2.8.2 fixes it. I've disabled automatic updates of my Thunderbird add-ons for now ...

[trev]

There is no actual data loss here, but Adblock Plus I/O is completely dysfunctional. This is because the communication with the embedded WebExtension doesn't work. From some quick debugging, the issue doesn't seem to be that the WebExtension didn't start up. However, the WebExtension didn't establish a connection to the main extension for some reason, and all communication ends up waiting for that connection.

[trev]

From the look of it, the embedded WebExtension started up "correctly" - the issue rather seems to be that WebExtensions are generally broken on Thunderbird and the code in the background page didn't even run.

[trev]

And I finally got to the root of the issue - while all the code is theoretically in place, Thunderbirds left the webextension-scripts category empty so that none of the WebExtensions APIs started up. Theoretically, the embedded WebExtension loaded. Practically, it has no APIs to use, in particular not the backgroundPage API. It's the same with SeaMonkey but you'd have to install a pre-release version to hit this issue - the current release is outdated and incompatible with Adblock Plus 2.9.

[abpbot]

A commit referencing this issue has landed:
​Issue 5279 - Fix broken I/O in non-Firefox applications

[Ross]

Fixed. ABP works as expected in Thunderbird and keeps settings after restarts.

ABP 2.9.0.4252-beta
Thunderbird 52.1.1 / Windows 7
Seamonkey 2.48 / Windows 7