I did it, I upgraded to the most recent Firefox beta release! It’s faster, it’s got a lot of cool new features, but it is a beta release so there are some compatibility issues with extensions and there are some bugs. The first of the bugs tha’t’s come up to bite me is the web based Movable Type blog posting page doesn’t work properly. It will render fine but in the WYSIWYG posting display none of the formating or insert buttons function. That makes quick posts to the blog a pain in the butt! In order to format text or add links in a post I have to revert back to hand coding all of the HTML instead of clicking a button and pasting a link. That’s where one of the cool features of Firefox comes in. Firefox has what is called extensions or plug-ins to enable additional functionality in Firefox. One of the many extenstions I have come to love is IETab. IETab allows a page to be rendered using the Internet Explorer “engine” instead of the Firefox “engine” without having to open up Internet Explorer separately. This is a cool feature for checking to see how a web page you are working on displays in a different browser or when you are browsing and come across a site that doesn’t render properly like the one I am using to make this post. There are a few other extensions that I just cant do without in Firefox. They are:
Del.icio.us Toolbar: This extension allows easy access to all of the bookmarks I keep on a social/bookmarking site called del.icio.us.
Go To Selection: Go To Selection allows the highlighting of text on a page then right clicking to open it as website in a new tab.
Snap Links: This one is great! It allows you to right click and drag a square over an area on a web page. Then it opens up all of the links within that square in new tabs. How cool is that!
When I upgrade Firefox these extensions ceased to function due to supposed incompatibility with the newer version of Firefox. This prompted me to do some research on a way to make them work. The first solution I came across was found at Lifehacker which is a great site for finding how to’s and information on all kinds of stuff. The post on enabling extensions required the tweaking of Firefox’s about:config file and disabling both a compatibility check and a secure update requirement feature. Although this does work I wanted to keep the compatibility checks and additional security of checking for secure updates.
Upon doing a bit more research I came up with an developers article on the Mozilla site explaining how to make an extension work with Firefox3 and it was actually pretty simple. You open up the install.rdf file that comes in the .xpi extension file. Edit the line that reads <em:maxVersion>2.0.*</em:maxVersion> to look like this <em:maxVersion>3.0.*</em:maxVersion>. That sounds complicated but it’s actually not.
To do it instead of left clicking the “Install Now” button on a extension page you right click and select “Save Link As” in the context menu. Then you save the extension file, that ends with.xpi, to your hard drive.
Next open up the .xpi file in your favorite Zip program. I like 7-zip, it’s free and simple to use. Then right click and choose edit on the install.rdf file that is included in the extension package. Find the line that contains <em:maxVersion> and change the version number to read “3.0.* instead of what ever is there. After you have done that save the file and update the archive. (7-zip will automatically update the archive for you.)
The last step is to install and enable the extension. Fire up Firefox, click on the “File” menu and select “Open File”. Navigate to the directory where you saved your .xpi files and select the one you want to install. Click the Install button when it becomes avaiable and go through the install process. Last thing to do is open up the add-ons menu by going to the “Tools” menu and selecting “Add-Ons”. When the “Add-Ons” list is displayed click “Enable” on the extensions that you have recently installed.
So far all I have tested this method with all of the extensions listed in this post and havent had any problems.
More information about extension compatibility can be found here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3
