Guide To Make Incompatible FireFox Addons Compatible With Latest Release

Firefox gains 22.48% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2009 Worldwide. After Internet Explorer Firefox is the most popular browser.Firefox features include tabbed browsing, a spellchecker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine like other browsers but one feature that make’s Firefoxto take advantage of other browsers is it’s native support of add-ons, created by third-party developers.

Mozilla Add-ons, informally known as AMO is the official Mozilla Foundation website to act as a repository for add-ons for Mozilla software. These add-ons include extensions, themes, dictionaries, search bar “search engines,” and plugins. Some times you may faced a situation when your favorite plugin is not Compatible with the Latest build due to developer was unable to update and you are unale to install that plugin. Here is the solution to fool Firefox and make the versioncompatible with the Latest Release. You have to edit the firefox version in install.rdf just follow the 3 steps guide given below.

Step 1 – Download the incompatible add-on
Locate the add-on you want to install. If it’s on the official Firefox add-on page you’ll have to click “See All version” to be allowed access to the .xpi. Now Right click on the now clickable “Add to Firefox” button and choose save target file as. A download window will appear and a .xpi file will starts to download.

Step 2 – Extracting the add-on with WinRar.
You can open the .xpi file with your favorite compression utility, i like WinRar. Move the .xpi to desktop now open WinRar from start menu. In file menu select Open Archive and browse the .xpi you moved to desktop. Now you can see a file Install.rdf double click on this file and open with notepad.

Step 3 – Modify and Save install.rdf
Once you have the document opened do not get intimidated by the amount of text that you see. I find it’s easiest to just do an edit / find and look for the word max. That should take you directly too

“< em : max Version > 3.0 ”.

All you have to do is edit what is between the > <. In this case it says 3.0. Change the number to the current installed version of Firefox. You can check your current firefox version in Help >>> About Mozila FirefoxVersion. Now note down your version and replace with between > < Once you have that change made, save and exit the Notepad.

That’s it. Now just open Firefox and drag the xpi file you just created into Firefox and choose install. Once you reboot Firefox your add-on should now function properly.