Extension compatiblity for Firefox 3 Beta

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 intermitent 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 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:

• In a new tab type about:config. You get a beautiful (and funny) window which looks like this.

• You know which button to hit. 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.
• 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. Now you should have an entry that looks like this

• Close Firefox and restart. See the magic, all your old extesions 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.

Technorati Tags: Incompatible Firefox extensions, Firefox Extension compatibility, Firefox Beta 3

Leechers of browsing speed...

And you thought pop-ups (of course pop-unders) were nagging. More than them are the leechers that sit right into the web page. You got it right I am talking about all the flash ads which have off late become the most preferred from of advertisements. First as being embedded objects they flirt with your browsing speed as they need to be downloaded as any other web object and secondly of the flashy nature. No offense to the people who work with them and have their earnings by these flash objects. I am sure you hate them as much as I do. But hold on please their is a solution.

If you are a Firefox (both 2 and 3 beta) or flock user then you have a sweet extension called as flashblock. This extension blocks all the flash objects and loads them only when you click them and hence considerably increasing the web page load time. There's a tweak though as most of the video players use flash movie players these videos are blocked too and hence you have to click them to watch them. As a suggestion to the person who has written it I am sure he can modify the code to make the extension sit in the status bar and could be toggled on an off by click of mouse. Thus allowing the user to chose for which site the flashblock is on and for which it is off. I can write it but I have other things in my kitty right now. I am sure there also exists a solution for Internet Explorer but I am not wasting my time looking for one because I firmly believe that it's not the browser of future (in fact it ain't even the browser of present). I don't use it unless the site is not firefox compliant (which today is not the case for most of the sites).

PS: Did you know that Opera is much better XHTML complaint compared to firefox.

Technorati Tags: Blocking Flash, Flashblock, Firefox