Posts Tagged ‘xpi’

頑張れ! Fix your favourite add-on for Firefox yourself!

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Probably my favourite add-on for Firefox is called “Link Extractor”:  When you right-click a link, it gives you the possibility to open all embedded urls in separate tabs or windows.

Unfortunately, the developer of said add-on hasn’t had time to update this add-on and the last officially supported version of Firefox is 3.x whereas today Firefox 6 was released on Ubuntu 11.04

If you really need this add-on (I couldn’t find one that provides similar features), you can fix it yourself:

1) Download the xpi from the official homepage

2) Open the xpi file with an archive manager such as file roller

3) Extract “install.rdf” to /some/folder

4) Delete install.rdf from the xpi file

5) Edit the extracted install.rdf with your favourite editor and change the line
<em:maxVersion>3.*</em:maxVersion>
to
<em:maxVersion>6.*</em:maxVersion>

6) Save the file, put it back into the xpi

7) Install the add-on via the menu Tools -> Add-ons, click on the toolset, select “Install Add-0n from File”, browse to the modified xpi and restart Firefox to activate the changes.

With this add-on, this works nicely. There certainly are add-ons where this simple tweak does not work but it’s worth a try, anyway.