How to Install or Force Enable Incompatible Add-Ons in Firefox 4 Beta
Firefox 4 is a major version upgrade for the web browser, and consequently, add-ons, plug-ins or extensions which have not been updated to run properly on Firefox 4 will not be compatible with Firefox 4. Early adopters who have upgrade to Firefox 4 Beta 1, there are in fact a lot of incompatible extensions been detected, and automatically disabled by Firefox 4 Beta.
In fact, some plugins, addons or extensions may be able to continue to work properly in Firefox 4, despite been labeled as incompatible by the web browser. Hopefully, by default Firefox will not allowed any incompatible extension, addon or plugin to be installed or enabled.
Use the trick below to disable and turn off Firefox 4 extensions compatibility check so that incompatible extensions can be installed or enabled.
- In Firefox 4 Beta, type about:config into the address bar, and hit Enter or Go.
- Click on I’ll be careful, I promise! button at the warning prompt.
- Right click on the window, and select New -> Boolean.
- Enter extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b as the preference name.
- Set its value to False.
- User can now install or re-enable incompatible extensions.
Note: It’s important to understand that not all extension will work perfectly in new version of Firefox, especially when it’s been tagged as incompatible.
Update: Disable Add-ons Compatibility Check in Firefox 4
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For Firefox 4.0 set the Boolean
extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0
to false
use the same booleon but remove the b from 4.0
so it should look like this extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0
restart firefox and your extensions will be re enabled. no guarantee they will work though
Just a note for those asking about Firefox 4 RC: I installed the Add-on Compatibility Reporter add-on, which allowed me to enable the incompatible add-ons.
How to disable Add-ons checking in Firefox 4 RC?
Now we've got to figure out how to disable compatibility checking for the Release Candidate. The instructions for the beta releases do not work for the RC.
[...] not actually using Firefox 4.0 beta at present, nor recommending it but found this worked with my extensions (with the exception of Norton IPS). __________________ Error! – Keyboard not [...]
Nice info. It is really useful for me to make one of my add-on compatible with Firefox. You can also make an extension compatible without altering anything in Firefox.
1. Download the extension .xpi file (right click and save as).
2. Change the extension from .xpi to .zip by renaming it.
3. Open the .zip file by using a 7Zip or other compress utility, and then extract or open install.rdf file using Notepad.
4. Locate this line <em:maxversion>3.6</em:maxversion>.
5. Change 3.6 to 4.0.
6. Save and close.
7. Re-change zip extension to xpi as it was done previously.
8. Drag the extension to the address bar of the Firefox 4 to install.
AWESOME! Thank you VERY much for this tip! I just downloaded and installed the beta 4 and all my add-on's were disabled. I tried the above tweak and, "Voila!" – all are working again!