How to Get Your Plugins Working in Firefox 3
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Firefox 3 beta 4 has been already released. It has many improvements and new features. Here’s what developers says about this new release:
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
- Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
- Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
- Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.
Unfortunately most Firefox Addons are designed for Firefox 2.0.0.*. Can you imagine Firefox without del.icio.us addon? I can’t. Fortunately because of the FLOSS nature of both Firefox and its Addons you can hack any addon and make it work for you.
Any incompatible Firefox addon
This is what you get if you’re trying to install del.icio.us addon in Firefox 3 beta:
Now, how to get it working? Here’s the solution:
- Download latest version of your plugin: del.icio.us_bookmarks-1.5.44-fx.xpi.
- Rename its extension from xpi to zip
- Unpack archive
- Find file Install.rdf in main directory of your unpacked archive.
- Open it with your favorite editor. It’s XML file, should look like this one:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF:RDF xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#"
xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"
xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<RDF:Description RDF:about="rdf:#$ZUQlk2"
em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion=”2.0.0.*” />
<RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:mozilla:install-manifest”
em:id=”{2fa4ed95-0317-4c6a-a74c-5f3e3912c1f9}”
em:name=”del.icio.us Bookmarks”
em:version=”1.5.44″
em:creator=”Yahoo!”
em:iconURL=”chrome://ybookmarks/skin/mydelicious32×32.png”
em:description=”Access your bookmarks wherever
you go and keep them organized no matter
how many you have.”
em:homepageURL=”http://del.icio.us”>
<em:targetApplication RDF:resource=”rdf:#$Zlk2″/>
</RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF> - Line with maxVersion attribute is the only one important to us. Change its value to 3.*
- Save file.
- Select all files in directory and save it as zip archive.
- Rename it to your_plugin_name.xpi
- Open newly created xpi file using Firefox (It’s unrecognized file extension by default. Choose Firefox as default app for opening such files)
- Firefox will ask you if you really want to install this addon. You know what to do.
That’s all. Wasn’t that difficult, was it?
Here’s working copy of Del.icio.us Addon for Firefox 3.
Of course not all addons are compatible with Firefox 3 and you have to know that this solution my cause your browser crash. I do not take responsibility for any damages!
Add comment if your “hacked” addons work properly or digg it if you found this article useful. Thanks!
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Ah - thanks for posting this Ludwik… most of my regular plugins all have updated versions now, but there’s one I use heaps that hasn’t updated yet (copy HTML Link… incredibly useful, select any text on a webpage, select copy as html link and it wraps the text in anchor tags with the correct url and copies to the clipboard).
Will go and try your method shortly - has really been frustrating me lately not being able to use that, lol.