Firefox: Installing incompatible Extensions (Older Versions)..
| January 9th, 2007I have always faced this problem when moving to the newer versions of Mozilla Firefox. Most of my extensions are incompatible with the newer versions of Firefox. So they extension do not get installed in latest Firefox. and I can not wait till the updated version of the extensions are available as some of these extensions I use almost every time as I start Firefox.
I have a workaround to install these incompatible extensions. Very simple one, people knowing XUL would already know.
The Firefox (Mozilla) extensions are of file extension .XPI. Here are the steps as I perform to make these Extensions compatible to newer version of Firefox in case they are not already:
1. Download the Extension (Don’t install it. It won’t install if the extension is incompatible with your current Firefox lolzz….)
2. Rename the Extension to any ZIPPED file format which you can open with a Zipped File Roller on your system (WinZIP, WinRAR, GZIP, PKZIP, ZIP)
i.e. On Windows if you have winzip/winrar installed rename your downloaded Extension file XYZ.xpi to XYZ.xpi.zip
3. Open the renamed Extension in a Zip File Roller i.e. winzip, winrar or gzip
4. Extract the file names “install.rdf” from the archive
5. Open the extracted file “install.rdf” in any text editing tool. (Notpad, Wordpad, Textpad, VI). This is actually an XML file
6. Search for Tag “em:maxVersion” replace the parameter value with you current Firefox Version and save the file
7. Add this file back to the Extension zip file.
8. Rename the Extension file back to its original name i.e. remove the zip extension we added.
9. Open this modified Extension File in Firefox, it will launch the Install Extension dialog. Install the Extension
Most of the extensions I know are actually compatible with higher versions also, since they are not tested in higher versions they are restricted to get installed in them. With these steps we can bypass this restrictions. The extensions will most likely work. In some cases they might not. So far all my extension I have been able to install and get them to work in newer versions especially Firefox 2.0 for which a number of extensions are yet not available.
-=oNo=-