Making extensions compatible in Firefox 3

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Life isn’t all that easy when you have updates and upgrades available at such rapid pace as Mozilla Firefox project. With an upgrade usually the framework is so much modified that your current Firefox extensions don’t work with the Alpha or Beta release. Now if you have an intermittent problem of testing newer non-stable versions of softwares then you miss out on the extensibility feature.

For example, there are very few extensions of Firefox 2.0.* which are compatible with Firefox 3 Beta. Hold on please, there is a tweak to get all your extensions (With exception of a few like Google Toolbar for Firefox crashes) working with Firefox 3 beta release. From what I have experienced the so called and much awaited FF 3 has some cool features. I have not played around with it much, but the first problem that I faced was to get all my extensions working with this new release. Here’s what you have to do to get all your extensions working. I must caution you though that there could be extensions that might make your Firefox unstable and make it crash. From what I have read All-in-one gestures when used with this tweak makes it crash for the first time. Also, this can cause some security glitch as well. So please use it at your own risk. Following are the steps:

1. In a new tab type about:config. You get a beautiful (and funny) window which looks like this.
   You know which button to hit.
2. Once you reach the about:config page look for an entry named extensions.checkCompatibility. If you see the entry then change the value to false.
3. However, if you did not find an entry, then right click any where on the page and under new select boolean. Set it’s value to false. That’s all.
4. Now you should have an entry that looks like this
5. Close Firefox and restart. See the magic, all your old extensions are now working and are visible.

You see a warning message marked with an arrow like the following:

Help yourself with further experimentation. And remember it’s a tweak that means it’s not suppose to be tweaked to avoid any glitches. I am sure with the final release all the extensions will be compatible. There is another way as well to make extensions compatible, but for that you have to make code level changes and I am not discussing them. Let me know if someone wants to do it that way.

Firefox 3 beta 4 released

Beta 4 release of Firefox 3 happened a couple of hours back. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 31 months. Firefox 3 Beta 4 has more than 900 enhancements over it’s previous beta release.

I am really happy to hear that there has been a drastic improvement in terms of memory usage. At one point of time I could easily relate Firefox as one of the most memory leaking application I came across. But then there was other cousin of firefox, flock that had the same issue. Most of the improvement in beta 4 over beta 3 are based on community feedback. We should be seeing community development and support as the next generation development platform. As a sneak peak check out the address bar.

Zotero-One of the best open source application

Zotero continues to gather acolades as it enters 2 years. The editors of PC magazine have chosen Zotero as one of the years best free software applications second year in a row. For those who have little clue about this amazing utility,probably it’s the right time to know more about this nifty open source extension for mozilla driven browsers like Firefox and Flock.

Zotero is an extension which is extensively used by researchers around the world. What it can do is take information accumlation and storage to next level. From managing your citations to bibliograpy, it easily beats out most of the proprietary softwares like end note. Being a community driven project it enjoys great support. All the features of Web 2.0 like tags and snapshots are integrated in this extension. Personally this happens to be one of my favourite extensions.