Like previous new releases of Firefox, not all of the add-ons or extensions worked at first. Most of the time this is due to that particular plugin’s settings limiting what version of Firefox the plugin is compatible with. Most of the more popular ones have already been updated to work with Firefox 3.5. If you have one that isn’t working and can’t wait for an update, you can try to work around it.

Looking in the ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/(profile).default/extensions directory, replacing (profile).default with your own, you should see a directory for each of your extensions.

Using my own example, at ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/(profile).default/extensions/moonlight@novell.com I have Novell Moonlight installed. Within is a file called install.rdf which I needed to edit.

First I made a copy of it in case I broke it after editing it.

cp install.rdf install.rdf-original

Next, the permissions needed to be fixed in order to save any changes I make to the file.

chmod 0600 install.rdf

Now to edit it. I chose nano but any text editor will do.

nano install.rdf

Paging down to the bottom, I find the following section:

<Description>
  <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
  <em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
  <em:maxVersion>3.1.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>

I changed the maxVersion to 3.5.* and saved it.

<em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>

Last thing to do was change the file permission back to a strict read-only.

chmod 0400 install.rdf

After giving Firefox 3.5 a restart, it was now possible to enable Novell Moonlight in lieu of a future update.

Keep in mind that this may or may not work with all Firefox plugins with some possibly causing havoc with Firefox itself. If that’s the case, you’ll need to reverse the changes you made and wait for an official update from the plugin’s programmers.

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