Suppress add-on dialog when launching Firefox

Question

When launching Firefox with new extensions installed, it comes up with a dialog box telling of the new extensions. I'd like a way to completely suppress this for our users, as we (in IT dept) already know it was installed and don't need our users to see anything about it.
Is there a way to completely suppress the add-on dialog so it doesn't come up at all? Maybe a command-line switch, javascript extension, or setting in an ini file?
Target is Debian and Ubuntu Linux with Firefox 3.6.
thanks!

Answer 1

This is stupid. Not only is the way to install plugins now basically a hack (unzipping an xpi file into a dir? really?), but getting rid of the notification is as well. I came up with three ways around this problem: a) install all plugins right after a fresh install, before any profile dirs are created, b) remove all profile directories, or c) edit the prefs.js file for the desired profile. Option "a" is obviously easiest but not always doable.
to fully automate on linux for option b (assuming kioskfox-0.4-fx.xpi is your extension file):
mkdir kf
unzip kioskfox-0.4-fx.xpi -d kf/
sudo mv kf /usr/lib/firefox-addons/extensions/`cat kf/install.rdf |grep em:id|head -1 | cut -d '>' -f 2|cut -d '<' -f 1`
rm -rf /home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*default
alternate to an rm -rf for option c (if firefox has been started already, and this line appears in the prefs.js):
mv /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/*default/prefs.js /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/*default/prefs.js.orig
cat /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/*default/prefs.js.orig | grep -v "extensions.newAddons" > /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/*default/prefs.js
dork around with it a bit to understand what I'm doing, to make sure you don't mess yourself up. obviously if you don't use the default profile, change *default to whatever the profile is named.
hth