Firefox 3 beta 4: Disabling Extension Compatibility Check

12 March, 2008

Most of the Firefox 3 Beta 3 plugins must be not working now with Firefox 3 Beta 4, they will not work until the Mozilla Admins approve them. So till then you are stuck with a browser with no plugins? Well no, not exactly. If you want your Firefox 3 Beta x plugins to work with Beta 4 follow the below steps.

Before you do that here are 2 Very Important Notes

Note 1: Only use the below method to add compatibility to Firefox 3 Beta x plugins. 95% of the older Firefox 2 plugins will mess up your Firefox 3 or will throw errors which will annoy you the most. So don’t try this with Firefox 2.x plugins.

Note 2: Incorporating this workaround only disables the compatibility check however, it does not mean that all your desired extensions will actually work. It only means that you?ll be able to install them. If you find that an incompatible extension renders Firefox 3 B4 unusable just open Firefox in “Safe Mode” and uninstall the offending extension.

Here?s what you do: (don?t include the quotation marks I?ve placed around the texts and statements when typing them in)Here?s what you do: (don?t include the quotation marks I?ve placed around the texts and statements when typing them in)

1. Open Firefox 3 Beta 4 and type in the addressbar “about:config” and you will see the below screenshot. Click the button “I’ll be careful, I promise” to proceed.

2. Now you will see the Firefox config page. Right-Click on a blank area of the page and select “New” in the menu and select the data type as “Boolean” (Boolean is a “true” or “false” type statement for those that don?t know), type the preference name as “extensions.checkCompatibility” and click ok.

3. Another screen will popup with a select option of “True” or “False”, Select “False” in this screen. If you didn’t get this, then you have done the above step wrong. Check the “Further Note” below to rectify your mistake.

4. That’s all restart your browser, and all your Firefox 3 Beta x extensions should work now.

5. After you have re-started the browser, if you goto Tools -> Addons you will see something similar to the below screen with a yellow bar.

DO NOT CLICK ON THE ENABLE BUTTON, or else you have to start this all over again.

6. Follow these steps for every Beta release of Firefox 3

Further Note: If you entered the wrong type (like String instead of Boolean) or perhaps misspelled the statement, your new entry will most likely be removed from “about.config” when the browser is restarted giving you another chance to try again.

Removing your entry: If you ever wish to turn compatibility checking back on then just go into “about:config”, type “extensions.checkCompatibility” into the search bar at the top of the list (the search result is automatically displayed) and when your entry comes up, right click on the entry and select “Toggle” from the context menu. The Boolean value should now read “True”. Restart the browser. If you want to remove the entry altogether then perform the search as stated above, right click on your entry when it comes up and select “Reset” and then restart the browser. Your entry will be gone now.