Here's how to fix recent Gnome Extensions website error

Desktop Environments Gnome
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Greetings lovely community,

Recently chrome-gnome-shell(the native browser connector for integration with extensions.gnome.org) has gone out of date and appears to no longer work. If you try to install an extension on the Gnome Extensions website, you’ll be greeted with an error message at the top of the browser saying something like one of the following messages:

Although GNOME Shell integration extension is running, native host connector is not detected. Refer documentation for instructions about installing connector.

Your native host connector do not support following APIs: v6. Probably you should upgrade native host connector or install plugins for missing APIs. Refer documentation for instructions.

I’m not exactly sure what is currently happening upstream, it looks like the devs are trying to split gnome-browser-extension and gnome-browser-connector to prevent some kind of confusion from happening, but in all honesty it’s only making me more confused? But in any case, where’s this fix at you talked about?

For now chrome-gnome-shell is out of date (and chrome-gnome-shell-git won’t even build), so to fix the issue luckily that same maintainer has put the new gnome-browser-connectorpackage in the AUR for us, so if you use and trusted the maintainer of chrome-gnome-shell, you can be confident to trust this gnome-browser-connector package since it’s from the same maintainer.

I’ve tested both gnome-browser-connector and gnome-browser-connector-git and with either package installed, you can successfully install extensions via the Gnome Extensions website if you so choose to.

Feel free to check out the gnome-browser-connector AUR packages: HERE

Of course it’s worth mentioning that you can use the GUI GTK4 app extension-manager to add/remove/install extensions as well, which is in the AUR as well: HERE

Hope this helps anyone that might come across this! This fix may be subject to change in the future perhaps, so if it does, I’ll update it accordingly.

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odd that chrome-gnome-shell is not in the arch repos (when it works)

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If it’s any comfort to you, you can trust the maintainer of the AUR package, it is maintained by Rafael Fontenelle

who is one of the coordinators of the GNOME pt_BR translation team and is also the admin of the GNOME Brasil group on Telegram, we were talking about this today and he promptly updated the AUR packages for anyone interested, there is no confusion about the two packages, what you need to install on the system is gnome-browser-connector the browser extension is the one that is normally installed in the firefox or chrome browser store.

As for the problem with the extensions site, the problem was in the site’s infrastructure not being influenced by the chrome-gnome-shell connector.

Captura de tela de 2022-07-13 17-52-30

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@CommanderKeen as far as I am aware, it was in the Extra repos for a time, but eventually became unmaintained by a TU (trusted user), so it had to be dropped to the AUR. This does happen with packages all the time so it’s nothing new, however when it’s for a package like this that I think is kind of essential if you use Gnome, it is a bit odd having in in the AUR. That could change of course if a TU stepped up to maintain it of course.

@Xterminator Thanks for much for all that helpful information! Just so I’m understanding you correctly, is my solution correct or do I need to make any adjustments?

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The information about the connector update is correct, but the problem with the extensions was related to the website, despite the chrome-gnome-shel connector showing the message that it is not v6 API compatible, it still installs the extensions since they fixed the site.

Many people didn’t even know about this problem because they install the extensions from the distribution’s repository and it happened during a day that I remember, particularly, even though I had the same shell version, I couldn’t reproduce it on my machine.

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Yeah it’s definitely a particular issue for sure, I just didn’t want to provide any inaccurate information out there. I only posted this after I found a solution that worked for me; I just didn’t see those specific Extension-Web and gnome-shell GitLab issues before I posted this that talked about the issue in more detail which is now good to know of course!

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Website seems to be working ok for me still on firefox. . . you may want to try firefox instead of a Chrome based browser. I tried from my last update (Sunday/Monday and then just updated now, both seem to be working).

It was down like a week ago though. It was a website error. It was a day I was trying to install, and I thought I did something wrong.