I resisted the temptation for a few days but then decided I just had to see what the new Firefox (RC 2) was like. I soon remembered what it's like to be on the bleeding edge..... half my extensions were hosed. Luckily Marjolein Hoekstra pointed me in the direction of a nifty extension called Nightly Tester Tools which, among other things, "allows you to force the application to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it." That claim struck me as odd but I can confirm it works, at least for the extensions I care most about.
October 12, 2006
I've used Nightly Tester Tools successfully for ages with a ton of extensions without stability problems.
The only extension that causes me non-stop problems is Google's own toolbar on FF 1.5, which it supposedly supports. I haven't been able to figure that one out unless there is a strange interaction with other extensions?
Posted by: Conor O'Neill | October 12, 2006 at 11:53 AM
Extension description files contain an explicit field in which the developer specifies which browser versions the extension works in. Obviously if 2.0 hasn't come out yet you don't know whether it will work, so you don't specify 2.0. Using the Nightly Tester Tools option just makes the browser ignore that field.
While your own code should work the same from one version to the next, the browser innards that your extension depends on can change significantly. For example, my extension, toggle search, is naturally tightly integrated with the browser search bar. And as it happens the search bar is one of the things that got an overhaul in 2.0. So I just submitted a new version:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2552/
Posted by: Rowan | October 13, 2006 at 06:57 PM