As Handy said, Firefox 2 is out…and it’s nice :)
Of course, as usual whenever there’s improvements to the extensions engine, a bunch of extensions that I use broke :( But…the most important one didn’t.
I’ve been using firefox since before it was firefox, back in the 0.5 days…and a while back (I *think* around the 0.7 days) I found the MR Tech’s Local Install extension. Back then, it was the only way to manage your extensions…you couldn’t uninstall extensions from the extensions manager itself, and this allowed you to do it. Then, later on, they added the one ability that makes it the most important extension I have…the ability to force compatibility of an extension.
After so long, there are a lot of extensions whose developers have given up on them or have simply disappeared or haven’t updated to the new system yet…and if you got used to said extension, it’s a royal PITA to live without it. Among those extensions, Compact Menu, because I move everything up to a single toolbar, and Tabbrowser Extensions, because I’ve aquired weird browsing habits…like focus-follows-mouse to change tabs (saves me clicks :) but on most Firefox upgrades, both of those extensions get disabled due to incompatibility (Compact Menu hasn’t been upgraded in years, and Tabbrowser Extensions seems to haven’t been upgraded since March of this year :( )…but here’s where MRTLI saves my day, because it can disable the compatibility check for an extension and let you load it even if it says it isn’t compatible.
Of course, problems can happen…some extensions I used to use have had to be dumped because they were really incompatible (ie. broke other stuff), but for this round of upgrades, Compact Menus and Statusbar Clock, MRTLI saved my bacon. Unfortunately, Tabbrowser Extensions is, indeed, 2.0 incompatible and had to be disabled…I hope it gets updated/upgraded some day…there’s lots of things in it that I use :( On the other hand, it may be time for me to start searching for other extensions that have been upgraded and that give me at least some of the abilities that TBE used to.
If you have extensions that don’t work and that you like to use, give MR Tech’s Local Install a try before you give up, it may save you too :)
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Tags: Thoughts
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
You may have already tried this, but I didn’t see you mention it, so…
Have you given the “Nightly Tester Tools” extension a shot? It can sometimes help those older extensions decide that maybe they will work with newer Firefox.
For that matter, I’ve grabbed the .xpi files and just edited the max version before too…
With either approach, doing that can sometimes lead to new and exciting ways to slag your browser when trying those old extensions. :-)
I’ve tried NTT, a few versions ago…it works about as well as MRTLI, but MRTLI has other things about it that I like, so I prefer it.
The problem with TBE is that it does indeed break the browser in small ways…you get an error on starting the browser, every time, and there’s a weird artifact on the browser window…unfortunately, I had to activate it anyway, ’cause mozilla’s extensions’ site is having db problems (due to the load of a major release, I guess) so I can’t even search around there to see if there’s some other extension, or set of extensions, that’ll do what I need TBE to do…so I have to live with the minor imperfections.