January :: 2010 :: Chris Jean

When newer versions of Firefox come out, there are always a few add-ons that fail to update quickly enough. After about a week of waiting, I’ve become tired of waiting for some of my add-ons to update themselves. These add-ons are ColorZilla (white reports 3.6.* compatibility, but it won’t install/update on 3.6), CSSViewer, and Live HTTP Headers.

Fortunately, updating is a simple matter. Just do the following:

Download the xpi file for the add-on
Open up the downloaded xpi file as a zip file
Open the install.rdf file inside the xpi file
Search for the targetApplication section with an id of {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
Change that section’s maxVersion to the version number to whatever Firefox version you want to be supported
Update the xpi file with the modified install.rdf file
Install the add-on by dragging the xpi file onto the Firefox window and clicking the Install button (this works for upgrades as well)

Here are the modified xpi files for each of the add-ons:

Note: All of these add-ons were updated to work with 3.6.*. Of course, they may not be compatible with future versions of 3.6, so use at your own risk.

Keep in mind that if you manually upgrade an older add-on, you do so at your own risk. I tested these add-ons, and they all work properly with 3.6.

One of my all-time most popular posts was how to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu 9.04. Now it’s Firefox 3.6′s turn to be installed on my system that is now running Ubuntu 9.10.

The team working on Firefox have put a ton of effort into this release and, in order to make our browsing lives safer and faster, rolled a number of features scheduled for 3.7 into this release. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

Read the 3.6 release announcement for details about what is new with this release.

So now onto the installation. Here are the commands that I ran in terminal to install 3.6.

[chris@rommie ~]$ cd /tmp/
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ wget "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux&lang=en-US"
--2010-01-21 11:41:08--  http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux&lang=en-US
Resolving download.mozilla.org... 63.245.209.58
Connecting to download.mozilla.org|63.245.209.58|:80... connected.
...

100%[=============================>] 10,161,471   924K/s   in 11s     

2010-01-21 11:41:20 (899 KB/s) - `firefox-3.6.tar.bz2' saved [10161471/10161471]

[chris@rommie /tmp]$ tar xvjf firefox-*.bz2
tar: Record size = 8 blocks
firefox/
firefox/update.locale
firefox/plugins/
firefox/plugins/libnullplugin.so
...
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/platform.js
firefox/defaults/autoconfig/prefcalls.js
firefox/libmozjs.so
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo cp -r firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.6
[sudo] password for chris:
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.old
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.6/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.6
[chris@rommie /tmp]$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.6 /usr/bin/firefox

Simply run each command listed in white in your terminal to upgrade your system with the latest release version of Firefox.

After running these commands, close out Firefox, wait a few seconds to let everything shut down properly, and run Firefox again. If all the steps were executed properly and without error, you should be running 3.6. You can click Help > About Mozilla Firefox to confirm.

Happy browsing.

Archive for January 2010

ColorZilla, CSSViewer, and Live HTTP Headers: Updated for Firefox 3.6

Upgrade to Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 9.10