Using Web Developer Toolbar with Firefox 3 Beta
THE UPDATES KEEP COMING! The toolbar has been updated for RC1, so be sure to grab it from Firefox addons, or the official site.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is out, so this article once again applies. Have at it! I’ll post another update when the toolbar is updated again and works out-of-the-box.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: The toolbar has been updated and should now work with Firefox up to beta 4. You can download it from Firefox addons, or the official site. Thanks Davosian for the heads up!
So I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 Beta 3, and am now using it as my primary browser. Major speed increase with version 3! Memory seems to be handled much better! Excellent!
Note: At the time of this writing, you can get Beta 2 from here. I went ahead and got a nightly build, which, at the time of this writing, is beta 3. Regardless of which beta version you choose, know that you are taking a risk as the software is not in its final stages.
If you are a web developer, you probably use Chris Pederick’s impeccable Web Developer toolbar.
It hasn’t yet been updated for beta 3! Why? Probably because it hasn’t been tested enough! If you are like me and are hardly concerned about that, and want your Web Developer toolbar, then you might be interested in knowing how to get it working with beta 3!
The steps:
- Download the Web Developer toolbar .xpi file from the official site. NOTE: If you are doing this from Firefox, you must right-click and choose “Save Link As…” (otherwise it will attempt to install the extension)
- Rename web-developer.xpi to web-developer.zip. (XPI files are just ZIP files with different extensions)
- Open the zip file, extract and open the file named install.rdf.
- At the time of this writing, the line we are looking for is line 27, and it should look something like this:
<em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>. - Change it to look something like this:
<em:maxVersion>4.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>. - Save the file and add it back to the zip file. Depending on your zip utility, this can usually be accomplished by opening the zip file and dragging the newly saved file back into it (be sure to overwrite the existing install.rdf). Rename the file to once again have an .xpi extension.
- Open Firefox and drag web-developer.xpi into the browser window. It should then ask you if you want to install the extension, and it should not complain about the FF version!
That’s it! This is working fine for me so far, but don’t come crying to me if your computer blows up…
UPDATE: Thanks Ronnie for pointing out the secure updates issue. I forgot to mention that. Check this comment for direction on getting around that warning. Please let me know if those instructions aren’t clear enough and I’ll update again.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The Edit CSS feature (which, to me, is one of the most important) seems to be glitching. It has worked, but doesn’t always. One persistent problem is with closing the Edit CSS dialog once it’s opened — it doesn’t close once it’s opened. So if you have 6 trillion tabs open and you want to edit the CSS on one of the pages… WAIT! Open a new window and then do it… That way once you’re finished, you don’t lose all your tabs.
January 27th, 2008 at 5:41 am
This workaround didn’t work for me, and I got a message that I’ve seen a couple of times now trying to install other extensions:
“This extension will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates.”
What a silly policy, come on Mozilla, let me override this!!
January 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Oh, thanks for pointing that out. I forgot all about that, I’ll add it to the post soon. To get rid of that warning, type in:
about:config
in your address bar and press enter. Right-click in the list and create a new boolean key called:
extensions.checkUpdateSecurity
And set it to false. Reference:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
I also noticed one called:
extensions.checkCompatibility
But I haven’t played with that yet… Heck, with that set to false we might not even have to worry about any of this.
February 8th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I’ve noticed that “Disable styles” works once, but it doesn’t restore the styles back… has anyone figured out how to correct this?
February 8th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
My best guess is that we’re SOL until a new version is released, unless someone wants to dive into the meat of the code…
February 8th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
This works great. I’ll post about it on my blog. Thanks.
BTW can you do the same for other extensions, i.e del.icio.us and seoquake?
February 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Yes you can do it to others, careful though…
February 9th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
[…] certain extensions, one of those being the Web Developer Toolbar. Earlier today I found a post from another blog that teaches you how to install the toolbar in Firefox 3. Luckily for me I was also able to use […]
February 14th, 2008 at 5:45 am
To make this hack work you had too to modify line 15 of install.rdf and change the address “http://downloads.mozdev.org/webdeveloper/update.rdf” adding the “s” of tls: “https://downloads.mozdev.org/webdeveloper/update.rdf” … Now you can have “secure update” :D:D:D
Enjoy!
RollsAppleTree
February 14th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Heh, I suppose that would be another way to do it… In fact, that might be a better way since you wouldn’t be doing anything to FF’s settings, just to the one extension… thanks for the contribution!
February 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Excellent tip. Working fine for me. Good work sir!
February 15th, 2008 at 10:08 am
will it be OK to let it update though? it seems to me (little as I know) that the install.rdf will be overwritten with a new version, with a new 2.0.0 maxversion string. won’t that foul up our operations?
February 15th, 2008 at 10:26 am
@Scott - Thanks! Glad it’s working!
@Alex - Yeah, good point… if it’s upgraded and overwritten, the process would have to be repeated. If I find out any info to the contrary I’ll post. The safest bet might be, if it reports a new version, to re-download from the official site and hack the XPI again…
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 am
Great idea! but it seems like the process is broken in Beta 3 (under Leopard). I and others seem to have run up a roadblock: whence installing the xpi file (note that drag-and-drop doesn’t work, i have to upload it to localhost and navigate to it), i get: “Malformed File
Firefox could not install this item because ‘install-02f..rdf” (provided by the item) is not well-formed or does not exist. Please contact the author about this problem.”
Cheers, if i find a solution, will let you know!
-mp
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I think Dusting might have found a solution. Let me quote him:
“The problem is mac creates the archive with a directory, instead of having the files at the root.”
http://www.vapaeso.info
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Thank you all so much for the input! Can’t wait till they roll out FF3 and update the toolbar to match it!
March 6th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Thank you so much guys, this work pretty good for me, Im a web developer and this was frustrated me! jejejeje
I from Montevideo, Uruguay and I will like to write a spanish version of this post If you dont mind….
Please if you are agree write me to my mail.
OF COURSE I will link to your site
PS. Sorry for my english, my language is the spanish and I now that is probability that be errors on this text.
THANK U AGAIN !!!!
MUCHAS GRACIAS DE NUEVO!!!!
Christian Serrón.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Glad it was helpful; replied via email…
March 6th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
[…] por eso que emprendí un viaje por la vieja y querida web en busca de una solución, la cual la encontre en Soulpass, el blog de Daniel Upshaw en el cual hay una guía que explica como lograr que sea compatible este […]
March 17th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
An official build for Firefox 3 (beta 4) is now available:
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
March 18th, 2008 at 1:37 am
Thanks for the info! The post will be updated to reflect that.
June 5th, 2008 at 10:55 am
[…] အဲဒီေကာင္လည္း ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ဆီမွာေတာ့ ဘာ ဟက္၊ ညာဟက္ေတြ လုပ္စရာမလိုပဲ အင္စေတာလ္ လုပ္လို႔ […]
September 4th, 2008 at 2:01 am
With new Firefox, We are not able to use ctrl + shift + s for disabling styles. Is there any workaround? thanks.
September 4th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Can… not sure what’s up with it — works fine here on WebDev 1.1.6 / FF 3.0.1.
Maybe it’s a conflict with another extension?
September 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
It might be the delicious-Extension.