How to download Firefox extensions from addons.mozilla.org without installing them?

Posted by kjo on Super User See other posts from Super User or by kjo
Published on 2012-06-24T18:08:39Z Indexed on 2012/06/24 21:18 UTC
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Pages at the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox site often feature buttons that say "Add to Firefox".

Clicking on such a button causes a Firefox extension to be downloaded and installed.

I am looking for a convenient way to limit this action to the download step only, so that in the end I am left with the downloaded *.xpi file in my disk.

Thanks!

P.S. The following approach is not only inconvenient: it doesn't work!.

  1. Inspect the HTML for the button, and extract a URL like

    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/1234/addon-1234-latest.xpi?src=search

    give or take the stuff after .xpi.

  2. at the command-line prompt, download this URL with wget or curl.

This download attempt just hangs. (Even if it didn't, I'd like to find a less cumbersome approach.)

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