Evan Sims

Getting your extensions to work in the Firefox 3.1 Beta

If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all the time in the browser. Instead, I discovered a far more elegant solution: just edit the XPI.

First, grab 7zip. It’s a free archive manager like WinZIP or WinRAR, but it plays nice with the XPI format. Now, go to the Mozilla Addons site and find the extension you’re looking to install. The “Install” option will be disabled, but no worries, just scroll down and hit the “All Versions” link. Now you’ll have one or more versions listed with enabled Install buttons, but using those won’t work: they’re marked internally as working with Firefox versions up to 3.0.*. This is what we’ll need to change.

Right click the Install link for the most recent plugin version, and save the XPI file to your desktop. Now, load 7zip and open that XPI file in it. Find the “install.rdf” file, right click and pick Edit. There’s a lot of nonsense in these files, but all we’re worried about is one string:

em:maxVersion="3.0.*"

Once you locate this line, change it to read:

em:maxVersion="3.1.*"

Save the file, allow 7zip to update the archive, then close 7zip. Now, in Firefox, go to the Addons window from the Tool menu and switch to the extensions tab. Drag the XPI from your desktop into your addons list. Firefox will install the addon for you without complaint. Restart Firefox and you’re done!

This hack will work for most extensions as there has been very few changes to the core functionality of Firefox in 3.1; most of the changes are to the Gecko rendering and JavaScript engines. I’ve successfully installed all my essentials in 3.1 without any problems, but if you do end up running into an addon incompatibility issue you can always start Firefox in Safe Mode from the Mozilla Firefox group in the Start menu.

Hope this helps!

Mozilla concept video a glimpse into the real Web 2.0?

“Aurora” is a concept piece by web think tank Adaptive Path for Mozilla, developers of the oh-so-famous Firefox web browser, and is intended to be a forward-thinking look into the future of how web browsers might function, render data and interact with users. The concept, at this stage in the game, is completely absurd of course, but who knows what the future may look like. The web has seen a huge surge of interest in openness with microformats and APIs in the last two to three years, and I don’t expect that to go away anytime soon, but for a concept like Aurora to work we’d need to see a truly open web that developers like I can only dream of at this point.

Update — Adaptive Path has posted several more videos in this Aurora series; they’re currently up to 4 as of this writing. Be sure to check those out as well.

Firefox 3 lands; download it now!

Firefox 3 is arriving today, and brings with it a whole host of lovely new features that I’ve grown to love using the betas and release candidates these last few months.

Some of the features I love in particular:

• The “awesome bar” (a new aspect of the address bar) gives me a central location to not only search my history but also my bookmarks and tags (see the new feature on those.) I can start to type “opendns” and not only will I find any pages I’ve visited recently with opendns in the URL or page title, but also any of my bookmarks with that word in it and bookmarks with that tag. It makes getting from A to B just that much faster.
• The all-new Bookmarks system is a huge improvement over not only Firefox 2 but every other offering out there on the browser market right now. The new system uses a SQLite database to store your bookmarks, reducing potential instances of data corruption and speeding up read/write time over the traditional .HTML file.

  The new UI makes things faster from the user experience, too. Want to bookmark a page your on? No problem! Just hit the star. The page is instantly bookmarked and sorted un an “unfiled” section of your bookmarks so you can manage it later. If you want to customize your bookmark right now, hit that start again and a little dialog pops up allowing you to name your link, tag it, describe it and so forth. All of this additional meta information is used for the “awesome bar” and really allows you to customize your browsing experience.

• Firefox 3 is fast! The new version of the Gecko rendering engine they’ve implemented is noticeably peppier than previous versions. And I can’t forget to the mention the drastically reduced memory consumption- Firefox 3 beats out every other browser on the market in that regard.
• It’s more secure; Mozilla has really beefed up their phising and malware detection system, and what’s more have made it much more obvious in the user interface when you’re browsing a secure site and when you’re not.
• Firefox finally has a native look on every platform. Now it doesn’t matter what OS you’re running the browser on, it’ll fit right in and look great. OS X, Windows 2000/XP, Windows Vista and Linux all have great default UIs that won’t make you cringe anymore.

So, download Firefox 3 today, and tell ‘em Evan sent ya’.

And hey, while you’re at it why not switch to OpenDNS? It makes your browsing experience that much safer, not to mention faster. Like Firefox it’s free, and unlike Firefox it doesn’t even require a download to set up. Just set your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and you’re done. Not sure how to do that? OpenDNS has a great guide on on the matter right here.