265850 - nightly builds refuse to load current extensions (or themes)

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Aaron Sloman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041023 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041023 Firefox/1.0

I cannot contribue to develoment except by being a tester. So I regularly
install new nightly builds.
But because the version label changed from 1.0 to 1.0RC1 none of the extensions
I previously used will work. I suspect the labelling of extension compatiblity
needs to be changed to allow experimental releases of firefox to use existing
extensions.

For me this is sufficiently serious to discourage me from testing new versions
of firefox.
(I think the same problem applies to themes, but for me this is less important.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install new firefox
2.Tools->extensions shows all old extensions greyed out
3.Attempt to update or load new extension (or theme)

Actual Results:  
So far I have not found a single extension that works with the latest nightly build.

Expected Results:  
It would be good for the compatibility checker to be more intelligent.

Comment 1

[Ali Ebrahim]

I sympathise with you, I really do. I run into the same problem. Unfortunately,
this is not a bug. If you really can't live without extensions, then sticking to
releases is probably the best way to do. FWIW, Launchy has a version that works
with version 1.0.

Marking as invalid.

Comment 2

[Aaron Sloman]

Thanks for the sympathy!

However, I don't need sympathy because I don't normally gain anything from
trying nightly builds. They very rarely have new features that I need. I run
them ONLY because I thought the development team wanted as many testers as
possible. 

But if it's impossible to test a browser if you can't use your normal working
environment, then there's no point testing it. So I guess I won't bother
with firefox nightly builds any more.

What worries me is that this means that when the trial releases become main
releases they will not have been tested fully.

But perhaps there is some logic here that I don't understand.

Anyhow, thanks for a great browser.
Aaron
===
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Aaron, in that case you have to patch the install.rdf inside the extension XPI.
Search for '<em:maxVersion>' and increase the number perhaps to '1.5'. So this
extension will theoretically work until the version string is greater than 1.5. 

Outdated extension shouldn't be enabled becasue they could run in trouble with
new versions of firefox. So we should take care 'maxVersion'. Everybody can
modify the install.rdf and can use the needed extension on own risk.

v.

Comment 4

[Aaron Sloman]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Aaron, in that case you have to patch the install.rdf inside the extension XPI.
> Search for '<em:maxVersion>' and increase the number perhaps to '1.5'. So this
> extension will theoretically work until the version string is greater than 1.5. 

Thanks Henrik. This eventually solved my problem, though it took me a long time
to discover that xpi files are zipped collections of files. So eventually I
worked out that I had to download the xpi file, unzip it or extract the .rdf
file, edit it, then re-zip it, after which the extensions worked if I gave
a file path name to the firefox 'open file' dialog.

(I am not a firefox developer, merely a grateful user who is also willing
to be a tester. I suppose developers would have found all that obvious.)

Now that I've spelled it out here, others looking at this bug may find it
easier to follow your recommendation!

Thanks.

Aaron