Firefox add-on woes
I’ve never had any problems with Firefox before, but recently I’ve been bugged by two separate extension-related problems:
Once or twice a day I’d press Ctrl-T and Firefox would crash. That’s really annoying when you’re doing most of your work through the browser (but thank goodness for session restore!).
Ever since I upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.2, I’ve been unable to use the inline spell-check, because the British English dictionary on addons.mozilla.org doesn’t support this version of Firefox(!).
I know that most crashes are the result of bad extensions, so I checked with a co-worker who wasn’t seeing the problem and disabled the extensions that were unique to my installation, specifically:
- Firebug 1.04
- User Agent Switcher 0.6.9
I did that a day or two ago, and so far, so good — no crashes. Firebug rocks, and I’ve used it on my home machine for a while, so I’m guessing it’s probably User Agent Switcher that’s at fault. But I’ll find out next week: after I’m sure that the crashes are gone, I’ll re-enable the extensions one-by-one and see when things start going wrong.
Update: Turns out it was Firebug after all! It looks like the problem is fixed in the 1.05 release (since I upgraded, it’s not crashing for me any more). Unfortunately, the Firebug release notes don’t appear to have been updated since 1.0.1, so I don’t have any way to check for sure.
Also, today, I finally got annoyed enough about the spell-check problem to do something about it. I found some instructions on MozillaZine describing the problem and how to fix it, which basically boils down to:
- Download the dictionary XPI file and save it locally.
- Unzip it somewhere (despite the extension, it’s just a standard ZIP file).
- Edit the included install.rdf file, and change the text inside the
<maxVersion>
element from2.0b1
to3.0a1
for the Firefox application (the first one listed, though you could also check for the right GUID). I chose3.0a1
rather than the suggested value of2.0.0.*
simply because the en-US dictionary uses3.0a1
— I suspect both would work equally well. - Rezip the XPI and open it using Firefox (either by dropping the file onto the content area or via File⇒Open File…).
You can also make it compatible with Thunderbird or Seamonkey using a
similar trick, of course, just by changing the other <targetApplication>
blocks.
For the record, here’s the other extensions I’m using at the moment:
- British English Dictionary (force-installed using the fix mentioned above).
- Google Toolbar for Firefox.
- wmlbrowser (an extension to view WML content, as used by mobile devices — see, for example, the BBC’s mobile website).
(plus DOM Inspector and Talkback, which shipped directly with Firefox).