make your extensions work with the firefox 3 beta
alternate title: "Ho To Make Firefox 3 Crash A Lot"
Over the last six or seven months, I've come across literally hundreds of blog posts and a decent number of full-length articles explaining how Firefox users can make all of their extensions "compatible" or "work" with Firefox 3 betas by making a very simple change to one of Firefox's hidden preferences.
This idea is not true. You can not make your extensions compatible by changing a Firefox preference.
Setting the hidden preference extensions.checkCompatibility to false does not make extensions compatible with Firefox 3. What it does is tell Firefox to not care about extension compatibility.
This is a problem because most extensions that are "fixed" by this change are genuinely not compatible with Firefox 3 and will cause problems ranging from pages not rendering correctly to frequent program crashes to Firefox not starting at all.
The only people that should be disabling this check are the extension developers and testing community that are contributing to making those extensions actually work with Firefox 3.
If you're experiencing regular Firefox crashes or other strange behavior after changing this preference, it is very likely that those problems are the result of an incompatible extension.
Firefox 3 is just around the corner and the community is making great progress in updating all of the most popular add-ons. Unless you're one of the people working on that, please don't open yourself up to crashes, broken web pages, or even security vulnerabilities by turning off the compatibility check.
You can undo the change by typing about:config into the addressbar, filtering on checkc and double-clicking the item to switch the value back to true
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
What do you suggest to people who use a particular extension that hasn't been updated in a very long time?
That's the only reason I use NTT, never had a single problem with it in the many years I've used it for just that purpose.
Clearly there are potential dangers that may arise from using extensions that aren't versioned for a particular Firefox release, but if that's the case, then just don't use that extension.
Posted by: James Asher | May 13, 2008 7:03 PM
Is there a resource available for the extension API changes between Firefox 2 and 3? or a resource that shows how to migrate them?
I have an extension that is fairly popular in certain communities, but no longer works in Firefox 3 (even after I updated it). I haven't worked on it in sometime, and dont really want to relearn the entire extension API to get it working again.
thanks...
mike
Posted by: mike chambers | May 13, 2008 8:44 PM
Mike, yeah. There's some great documentation on this (and lots more) at the Mozilla Developer Center http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | May 13, 2008 9:54 PM
James, I'd warn against using an unmaintained extension. How do you know, for example, that it's keeping up with security improvements in new Firefox releases?
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | May 13, 2008 9:56 PM
@asa
Thanks. That is exactly what I was looking for. I think I already see what the problem with my extension is.
mike
Posted by: mike chambers | May 13, 2008 10:06 PM
Posted by: hecootion | May 14, 2008 5:34 AM
hecootion, because active extension authors are an active part of the Mozilla community and respond when Mozilla recommends specific types of changes or updates or offers more secure APIs.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | May 14, 2008 1:32 PM
I really wish Google Browser Sync would be updated for FireFox 3.
I have created a petition to try and raise enough support to garner awareness that many people use it and would like Google to update it.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/googlebrowsersyncff3
Posted by: Max Rathbone | May 21, 2008 5:02 AM
One of my frustrations with add-ons and extensions for Firefox is the lack of a consistent method to communicate with the developer. Indeed, some developers seem to not want to hear from users at all. It seems to me that Mozilla should require developers to post a genuine link for users to send messages to the developer.
Posted by: Ray | May 22, 2008 7:31 AM
There are many extensions, that are never updated anymore.
I think quite a few of these are not a security risk.
Therefore a security update is not needed.
And turning off the compatibility check is perfectly acceptable for these.
And example of this might be ImgLikeOpera
Posted by: Randall | May 26, 2008 3:38 PM