Monday, August 15, 2011

When your favorite Firefox extension gets 'obsoleted' on you...

...you can sometimes get around waiting for the developer of the extension to update it for whatever version of FF you're currently on.

Often, the extension will have an attribute specifying the greatest version of Firefox that it can be used on.  This is, of course, a safety mechanism to avoid having a new version of Firefox break the extension and everyone start screaming at the extension developer (which is always a stupid thing to do irrespective of your reasoning) about how their extension is crap/broken/stupid/et cetera.

I have a Firefox extension that I dearly love and for the past few weeks, since I let Firefox update me to version 6.0.* I have been without it.  I ***NEED*** my Morning Coffee I tell you.

So, finally getting my lazy a**, I decided to look into this and found a version attribute in the extensions install.rdf file that limited it to 4.0.*.  I changed that to 8.0.*, and then started up Firefox and voila - lo and behold morning coffee is on.  Thank you God (and Shane Liesegang.)

So, to do this yourself:

1.  Find your morning coffee add-on, or download it (it should be a file ending in *.XPI)

2.  Unzip it (it is basically a zipped folder)

3.  Edit the install.rdf file, changing maxVersion to 8.0.* (or some value matching your current Firefox version or higher (mine says em:maxVersion="8.0.*")

4.  Recompress the folder (make sure you are inside the unzipped folder and select all of the items in the root of the directory because many archiving utilities create an extra folder to store your zipped content in when the compress)

5.  Change the file extension, if necessary, to *.XIP as this is the default extension extension *chuckle* - your honor, your honor...

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