Make Firefox Extensions Compatible After Firefox Update Breaks Them For No Good Reason
I wasn’t going to write another Firefox article tonight, but after restarting Firefox the automatic updater ran without my permission and broke my favorite extension. I could obviously crack open the extension and manually fix the problem, but it’s just ridiculous to have to do that.
Short Rant: Why does an x.x.x.1 release have to break any of my extensions? That’s just completely ridiculous. I realize that the extension developers could have picked a better version number in order to handle this, but it worked fine with 2.0.0.5, so it should work with 2.0.0.6.
Back to the topic… you have a few options at this point:
- Crack open the extension in your profile directory and change the version number in the extensions.rdf file.
- Install the Nightly Tester Tools which will let you override the incompatibility.
Once you install the Nightly Tester Tools extension and restart Firefox, open up your Add-ons folder, right-click on the incompatible extension, and choose the “Make Compatible” option from the menu.
Now once you restart Firefox yet again, your extension should be back to normal and working fine.
Second Rant: Installing themes, plugins, changing options, restarting because of memory leaks… Rebooting Firefox is beginning to remind me of Windows 98.
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Security updates do not break extensions unless the extension author failed to write the extension’s compatibility version correctly. If you have an extension that’s disabled with a security update, contact the extension author and let her know that she hasn’t put the correct compatibility string in the extension. It’s probably missing a .0.* or something simple like that.
- A
I realize it’s the extension developers fault for not following the guidelines.
That said, it’s still extremely annoying, especially in this case…. why did it work fine with 2.0.0.5 but not 2.0.0.6 ?
The Geek: Asa Dotzler answered this it looks like to me. You are supposed to define for maximum version to support, for instance, all 2.0 versions or all 1.5 versions. The author instead specifically said the highest compatible version was 2.0.0.3, which is was a security update. I made a version that shuold work with all future security updates to 2.0.
http://localhostr.com/files/aa.....077cfb.xpi
Let me know if that works.
Jake,
Thanks for the update… I’ll install it.
A minor heads-up: You may not notice it at first, but while the Nightly Tester add-on is active, it triggers a “buildâ€? number reference in the title bar of the Firefox browser. If that annoys you, after you have made your extensions “compatible” just disable the Nightly Tester add-on and the build number disappears.
Wow, awesome, awesome tip! I rely heavily on several of my extensions for work productivity, and the authors of certain extensions are slow to update version compatibility. This saves me, big time. Thanks Geek!
Or even easier, create a new (true) boolean key in about:config called “extensions.checkCompatibility” http://kb.mozillazine.org/Exte.....patibility