Workaround: Mozilla release Shiretoko; messes up my extensions
Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 which adds some interesting new features.
- An improvement on the Acid 3 test, now scoring 83/100.
- Internal tab-switching (using CTRL-TAB)
- Initial support for web worker threads, which improves Javascript support for certain scenarios.
Great! Only problem is - most of my add-ons stopped working.
Annoying - chances are, if the add-on was supported in Firefox 3.0, it might just work in 3.1a2.
So... to bypass the add-on compatibility-check:
- On Windows XP, navigate to C:\documents and settings\[username]\application data\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles\[random folder]\extensions
- On Windows Vista, navigate to C:\Users\[name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\lmqbc2av.default\extensions
- If you can't find the folder, try a file-search for install.rdf
- Each folder in the above-location is associated to a Firefox extension.
- Open a folder and edit the install.rdf file.
- the install.rdf file is really an XML file - look for "maxversion". I changed the value to "3.1.*"
Note: There might be another (cleaner) way of getting around this problem. The about:config page used to have an extensions.checkCompatibility variable which could be set to ignore these, but it has been taken out in this release.
Note 2: I've tried this out with the Delicious, StumbleUpon, Better Gmail, and Firebug extensions and have had no problems, but I can't guarantee that it will work for you.
Note 3: This hack will most likely work for lots of up-coming releases of firefox.
Note 4: I would probably activate each one of the add-ons one-by-one just to see everything works properly. If it crashes the browser, you can just revert/undo the changes you made and wait until a new version of the add-on comes out.
I love browser-wars.
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