How to force uninstall local (unpacked) extensions from Microsoft Edge

Question

How to force uninstall local (unpacked) extensions from Microsoft Edge

Plamen Trifonov 20

Is it possible to use admin policies on edge/windows (or any other method) to remove all locally installed extensions?

We developed an internal browser extension for our company that employees would install from developer mode -> load unpacked.

It was a mess when we had to push an update, sending new files and asking staff to follow the installation steps.

So we managed to self-host the extension on our own servers and force installed it to all managed devices by using group policies.

The problem is that old version of the extension still persist on the devices. How can we remove all old version of the extension, those that were installed locally from developer mode -> load unpacked?

We disabled the policy ExtensionDeveloperModeSettings but it only prevents users from installing new local extension it didn't remove the existing ones.

We thought about using the ExtensionInstallBlocklist policy but that requires an extension ID. Every time you install a local extension it generates a new extension ID, even if you have specified a "key" in the manifest.json file, so we don't have a list of IDs to block.

The name of the extension is consistent but I couldn't find a way to use group policies to remove extensions by name.

We even tried the built-in extensions API:

chrome.management.getAll(extensions => {
	for (const extension of extensions) {
		if (extension.installType === "development") {
			chrome.management.uninstall(extension.id);
		}
	}
});

However, this doesn't automatically remove it, it prompts the user with a popup dialog and they have to click the button to uninstall the extension. This relies on the user action, so it's not a guaranteed.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Answer 1

Anonymous

Hi @Plamen Trifonov,

You only need 2 policies for this:

ExtensionSettings --- Remove all unpacked extensions (preventing web extensions from being removed). The policy value: { "*": {"installation_mode": "removed" }, "update_url:https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx":{"installation_mode":"allowed"}, "update_url:https://edge.microsoft.com/extensionwebstorebase/v1/crx":{"installation_mode":"allowed"}}
ExtensionInstallForcelist --- Specify which extension should be forcibly installed (and should not be removed by ExtensionSettings)

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Best Regards,

Shijie Li

Plamen Trifonov 20 Reputation points

2024-11-05T07:20:59.5033333+00:00
Thank you for the quick response Shijie Li,

I guess this would work, however, it has the undesired consequence of also removing extensions installed from the web store.

We want to preserve the extensions that employees have already installed from the webstore because they help with productivity (such as grammar and spelling checkers, text expanders, etc...).

Do you know if there is a way to target specifically upnacked extensions?

We though about using a powershell script to run on each device and clean up the extensions by reading the extension name from the manifest.json of each extension and if it matches "Our Company Name Extension", then we delete it.

# Define the path to Edge extensions $edgeExtensionsPath = "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Extensions" # Get all extension directories $extensions = Get-ChildItem -Path $edgeExtensionsPath -Directory foreach ($ext in $extensions) { $manifestPath = Join-Path $ext.FullName "manifest.json" if (Test-Path $manifestPath) { $manifest = Get-Content $manifestPath | ConvertFrom-Json if ($manifest.name -eq "Our Company Name Extension") { # Remove the extension directory Remove-Item -Path $ext.FullName -Recurse -Force Write-Output "Removed extension: $($ext.Name)" } } }

But unpacked extensions are not aggregated in a folder like regular ones, which go in the directory C:\Users<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Extensions. Instead they are loaded from where the folder with the manifest.json lives.
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Anonymous

2024-11-05T09:14:16.1066667+00:00

Hi @Plamen Trifonov,

I just realized that you can use "update_url" to protect web extensions from being removed. Please check my updated answer (the policy value).

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How to force uninstall local (unpacked) extensions from Microsoft Edge

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