macOS Safari has a disappearing extensions bug
Last Wednesday I needed to log in to a website and to my surprise the Bitwarden extension had disappeared from the toolbar. I went to Safari > Preferences > Extensions to enable it again and found that it was no longer listed. Then I noticed that the Goodlinks, and Wipr Extra extensions had also disappeared. What the hell!
I emailed Bitwarden and Goodlinks support, hoping to get an answer as to why this happened and how to restore the extensions. Here are the responses that I got and how to get the extensions back:
This is posted in the Wipr FAQ:
Wipr Extra Is Missing
If you can see Wipr Part 1 2 and 3 in Safari’s Preferences under Extensions, but not Wipr Extra, you’re being bit by a bug. Safari can’t seem to reliably index Web Extensions like Wipr Extra.
Note that this affects all Web Extensions, not just Wipr, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Please complain to Apple – the more people complain, the sooner they’ll fix this.
The following Terminal command has been reported to fix the issue (at least temporarily):
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -f -R /Applications/Safari.app
I got a similar response from GoodLinks support in an email.
Hi Loren,
Could you try quitting Safari completely and running this command in Terminal?
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -f /Applications/Safari.app
If it still not work, try restarting your Mac after running that command.
Thanks,
Ngoc
I can confirm that the terminal command reinstated the missing extensions.