Firefox 4 beta is fast and how to tweak extensions for it

The new Mozilla Firefox 4 beta 1 browser was released about 10 days back.  I finally dared to install it and what a surprise – the GUI is very slick, pleasing to the eye and is blazingly fast.

It is even faster than FF 3 with Fasterfox.  The add-ons I use (1-click weather, Download Statusbar and Blog This for WLW) all work seamlessly, once you install them.  And the trick is to install them.  Off the shelf, these add-ons won’t install on the FF 4.  Here is the tweak to make them install on the latest version.  BTW following this tweak you can install any incompatible add-on, but there is no guarantee that they will work without crashing themselves or the browser.

• Download the ‘addon’.xpi which you want to install



• Using an Archive (compression) utility, like 7zip, open up the add-on



• locate the ‘install.rdf’ file inside the archive, select and click edit



• locate the “<em:maxVersion>*.*.*</em:maxVersion>” tags in the rdf file.  The numbers (represented by *) limit the version with which the add-on will work.  Change the number to your ‘required’ version number – here changed to ‘4’.
• Save the file.  If you use 7zip, it will auto-ask whether you want to ‘update it in archive’, click ‘yes’.  If you use any other archive utility, you might have to extract/unzip it to edit and zip it back as xpi after editing.

If you change the GUID in the tag “<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>”  inside “<em:targetApplication>” tags, you can change the application (browser) for which the add-on is intended (of course the browsers should be compatible, like Firefox and Flock). 

Here I changed the GUID to <em:id>{a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}</em:id> and the same “blog this for WLW.xpi” will work in Flock.

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