Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Enabling Google Toolbar with Firefox 5, 6, 7....

Firefox 5 Available for Download

The magic of open market competition...

Just three months after the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla has pushed out Firefox 5 for the desktop and Android devices.

That’s a big change from the two years it took to move from Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 4. Firefox 5 is part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development cycle. This cycle, which is more akin to what Google does with its Chrome browser, promises faster, more iterative updates.


But there is a problem: Google toolbar does not support FF5 yet (3 months later!)
No conspiracy, Google engineers are just busy with Chrome :)

And there is a solution.

Thats because the old installed version of googletoolbar has a file named install.rdf that declares the max supported version of firefox to be 4.0.

To fix this ,just open the install.rdf file with notepad and change maxVersion from 4.0.* to 6.* (see the image i've also uploaded)

Now, in order to find the correct install.rdf file do the following:
Go to folder : \Users\[your user name here]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[sometext].default and search for the install.rdf file (Windows 7)
or
\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (Windows XP)

Windows search will find many install.rdf files (one for each addon you have installed on firefox) so make sure that you find the install.rdf that has the line
Google Toolbar for Firefox in it.

For this install.rdf file just rename the max version as stated above , restart firefox...! "et voila" Google toolbar is back!




Update September 2011: Firefox 7 has arrived,
and Google still didn't change that one character in config file for toolbar
that is needed to make it work with new Firefox browsers!
No conspiracy, just too busy with Chrome :)