Downgrading Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3.0

David dgboles at comcast.net
Mon May 11 14:15:48 UTC 2009


On 5/11/2009 9:14 AM, Douglas E. Warner wrote:
> David wrote:
>> On 5/11/2009 8:07 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>>> OK, first off, why in $DEITY's name are we including Firefox 3.5b4 and
>>> Thunderbird 3.0b2 in Fedora 11? These are unstable branches of the
>>> browser and email client, and as such are supported by almost none of
>>> the myriad of extensions available for the 3.0 and 2.0 versions,
>>> respectively.
>>>
>>> I was more than a little disappointed when I upgraded my laptop to the
>>> F11 Preview to discover that only two out of seven of my Thunderbird
>>> extensions and three of my thirteen Firefox extensions remained functional.
>>
>> Depending on exactly what extensions that you have if you *download*
>> them you can change this. Open the .xpi, or .jar, with the archive tool.
>> Open the file named  'install.rdf'  with your text editor and look for
>> the line that says "<em:maxVersion>". Change that number to the version
>> that you are using. Or even a little higher if you like. Save and update
>> the  'install.rdf', close the archive tool, and install your new extension.
>>
>> This works for most themes too.
> 
> The point is that most extension developers haven't felt the need to try to
> update their extensions for Thunderbird 3 as the API hasn't stabilized yet.
> Thunderbird extensions are much more finicky than Firefox extensions I would
> wager, especially given this major feature update.  I would offer that Firefox
> 3.5b4 is a lot closer to RC than Thunderbird 3.0b2 is, and I still expect
> there to be problems with extensions for Firefox before release (this was very
> common for Firefox 3.0 as well where changes broke extensions even in the RC
> series).


I use nine extensions with Thunderbird 3.0b2. Most of them I 'modified'
as I described above. I use eleven extensions with Firefox 3.5b4. Most
of which I 'modified'. I have not had any problems with any of them.
-- 


  David




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