Modify Incompatible Firefox Extensions to make them work with Firefox 3

Ever came across an extension that you badly want to run with Firefox 3 and are in no mood to downgrade to earlier versions of Firefox, and you aren’t comfortable with modifying about:config, the other day I came across this extension called minimize to tray and I badly wanted it to run with Firefox 3 ,actually what it does is that it minimizes Firefox to tray when you press CTRL+SHIFT+M, now whenever I am done with with Firefox I don’t close it instead I minimize it, it is working great so far in Firefox 3.0.1, I am using the same extension as an reference in this post:

first step is to get the .xpi file of the addon you want to make compatible with Firefox 3.0.1, to do that go to Mozilla addons site and open the page of your desired extension, now the problem is that the add to Firefox button is greyed out because its not compatible otherwise we would have right clicked it and chosen “save link as” option but now you  can get xpi file by changing your browser e.g Internet Explorer (you can use IE tab too) as it will turn the add to Firefox button to download now button and then you can easily save the xpi file to your hard disk

there are two other methods but this is the easiest

once you are done with saving the extension’s XPI file you need a compression software like Winrar, you can also you 7zip but I haven’t tried it and I am only going to use winrar as reference in this post

once you are ready with the compression software right click the xpi file and click on “open with”, now in the window that shows up select winrar

when this xpi file opens in winrar, now just click on extract to and extract using the default setting (this will extract the file in the same folder where the xpi file is)

now open the the install.rdf file from the extracted files in a word editor like notepad and you will see the code similar to that above

now you need to edit the code that is highlighted in the screenshot above, change the line <em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>  to  <em:maxVersion>3.0.*</em:maxVersion>, to make it compatible with Firefox 3.0.0 onwards

that’s it! now save the file and close it

now repeat the second step that is opening the xpi file in winrar

once you have opened it drag and drop the install.rdf file we just edited to the winrar archive

now it will show you a window click on OK and you are done you have just modified the extension

now to install this newly modified extension you just have to drag and drop this XPI file to Firefox addons manager window and it will install it without giving you any incompatibility error

actually the advantage of using this method instead of using that about:config hack is that you have a ready to use XPI file that you can use the next time you want to install this extension

Bonus: Here’s the Modified XPI file of MinimizeToTray Firefox extension

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