Skip to main content

Firefox Add ons

How to make Firefox addons compatible with the newest release.

Everybody likes to try out the newest version of Firefox. At the time I was writing this Firefox 3.1 beta 1 was available. When you install it you will find some of your existing Firefox add-ons may have already been updated to work with the new version. Others won’t install at all.

Don’t be surprised if some of the add-ons you modify to be compatible, bring Firefox to its knees. They don’t let you install older versions for a reason. But so I’ve had no problems at all.

Step 1 – Downloading the add-on


Locate the add-on you want to install. If it’s on the official Firefox add-on page you’ll have to click “See All version” to be allowed access to the .xpi. Right click on the now clickable “Add to Firefox” button and choose save target file as.

Step 2 – Extracting the add-on.

Locate the add-on you just saved. You should be able to open the .xpi file with your favorite compression utility. I use Power Archiver and it seemed to work just fine. Other compression utilities compatibility may vary. Extract the add-on to the folder of your choosing. I usually recommend extracting it to its own folder on the desktop.

Step 3 – Modifying install.rdf

Open the folder you just extracted the xpi file to. You’ll see a file called install.rdf. By default windows will have no idea which program to use to open the file with. You can either use notepad or WordPad.
Once you have the document opened do not get intimidated by the amount of text that you see. I find it’s easiest to just do an edit / find and look for the word max. That should take you directly too

3.0”.

All you have to do is edit what is between the > <. In this case it says 3.0. Change the number to the current installed version of Firefox. In this case I have Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 installed. Which is written out as 3.1b1. So when I get done, it should say

3.1b1”.

I guess you could also plan ahead so you don’t have to edit this for every new release. You could probably change it to 3.1b4 or something in that nature.
Once you have that change made, save and exit the file.

Step 4 – Recompressing the xpi file.

The method of recompressing it into a file will vary by the software you use. If you use power archiver or winzip, I would recommend you open the folder containing the extracted contents of the xpi file and do a select all. Once all the files are selected, right click anyone of them and click “Add to zip”. When you’re done you should have a file ending in .zip. All that is left is to rename the zip file (in XP you’ll have to make sure you can see file extensions) to the name of the xpi file you downloaded earlier. Just make sure when you are done that the file ends in .xpi and not .zip.

That’s it. Now just open Firefox and drag the xpi file you just created into Firefox and choose install. Once you reboot Firefox your add-on should now function properly (hopefully).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, available above, Google emplo

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow