Add-ons using the techniques described in this document are considered a legacy technology in Firefox. Don't use these techniques to develop new add-ons. Use WebExtensions instead. If you maintain an add-on which uses the techniques described here, consider migrating it to use WebExtensions.
From Firefox 53 onwards, no new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
From Firefox 57 onwards, WebExtensions will be the only supported extension type, and Firefox will not load other types.
Even before Firefox 57, changes coming up in the Firefox platform will break many legacy extensions. These changes include multiprocess Firefox (e10s), sandboxing, and multiple content processes. Legacy extensions that are affected by these changes should migrate to WebExtensions if they can. See the "Compatibility Milestones" document for more.
A wiki page containing resources, migration paths, office hours, and more, is available to help developers transition to the new technologies.
This page describes how to run other programs from your chrome JavaScript code, using Mozilla XPCOM interfaces. There are two ways to run programs.
Using nsIProcess
The recommended way is to use the nsIProcess interface because it is crossplatform.
Using nsILocalFile.launch()
nsILocalFile.launch() for details and make sure that all your target platforms support this method!This method has the same effect as if you double-clicked the file, so for executable files—it will just run the file without any parameters.
For more information on nsIFile/nsILocalFile, see File I/O.
var file = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/file/local;1"]
.createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsILocalFile);
file.initWithPath("c:\\myapp.exe");
file.launch();
References
nsIProcessnsILocalFile- If you need to launch an executable bundled in your XPI, see Code snippets:File I/O#Getting your extension's folder.
- Launching an executable process from a web page