I am a Web Designer

This was a must have for me before I could adopt firefox 3 as my main browser. I had looked at a number of solutions and although none of them worked, I did manage to cobble together a few tips from each to arrive at my own solution that did work… and it’s dead easy! Read all steps before you attempt to install

The typical advice you’ll find after googling will no doubt be something like this…

# 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:
2.0.0.*.
# Change it to look something like this:
4.0.0.*.
# 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!

The first problem OS X users may face, is that its not straight forward to rename the new zip file back to an xpi, Finder simply renames the file to a .xpi.zip when you attempt this in the conventional manor. However, if you highlight the offending zip file and press apple+i, this will bring up the info pane for that file. When the file name is listed, uncheck the ‘hide extension’ box and then replace the .zip with .xpi in the filename box – then hit return and you will be prompted to confirm the change.

You now have a proper xpi file, however, if you attempt to install this file you’ll no doubt be greeted with…

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.

If this is the case, then this is because you have archived the entire folder that stuffit created, thus removing the install.rdf from the root of the archive. To remedy this, simply enter this folder, select all files and archive them. Repeat the renaming system above and you should now have an installable xpi file.

The final problem you may encounter is this error message when attempting to install your xpi file…

“This extension will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates.”

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”

I needed all of these hacks and have now a fully working copy of web developer toolbar for firefox 3 beta 3 on OS X Leopard.

This method works for some other firefox extensions, so it’s worth playing around. I used it to get htmlTidy to install – there are a couple of issues with it – but essentially works.

UPDATE: – this meathod also works for the firefox google page rank addon