The Web site of Alex S. Jones, community catalyst, user advocate, Web technologist, barbecue acolyte & information junkie

Using ‘Incompatible’ FireFox Extensions

One of the only gripes I’ve had with Firefox is that every new version number knocked out several extensions. Thus, I would have to wait for the extension’s author to post an updated version. Typically, the only change is an update to the version of Firefox that the extension supports (0.8 to 0.9 to 0.10 to 1.0…) Now that 1.0 is out, this should happen far less frequently, but, of course, 1.0 breaks extensions that I want to use. So, a quick bit of research lead me to this forum post which provides easy to follow directions for fixing these ‘broken’ extensions:
1. Close Firefox
2. Edit the file Extensions.rdf contained in %appdata% > MozillaFirefox > Profiles > randomname > extensions
(on my Windows box, I edited C: > Documents and Settings > Alex Jones > Application Data > MozillaFirefox > Profiles > r0cy7i5r.Alex > extensions > Extensions.rdf )
3. Change every occurrence of maxVersion=”0.10″ to maxVersion=”1.0″
4. Start Firefox and look at your extensions menu. If the extensions are still grayed out, right-click on each one and click on ‘Enable’. Once you restart Firefox, these should be available as well.

  1. This worked like a charm! I have my draggable tabs back, and that makes me very happy.

    November 11, 2004
  2. Great to hear!

    November 11, 2004
  3. do you have any suggestions how i should go about *installing* extensions that refuse to be installed because of version problems?

    kobo
    November 11, 2004
  4. Check out the Extensions Mirror as they have some people who update the version number in a lot of extensions that would otherwise be left in the dust. If you don’t find what you need there, you may want to check out the MozillaZine forums, as that would be the ultimate resource for an answer. :)

    November 11, 2004
  1. [...] t fixes the version-compatibility issue and will get most extensions back up and running. He posted the directions for the hack on his site, and I can confirm that [...]

    November 11, 2004

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