firefox3 beta5 + adblock plus workaround

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Ubuntu Hardy “upgraded” to firefox3 beta 5 recently, which most likely broke all of your add-ons and extensions because they probably failed the compatibility check.

For many extensions, it probably doesn’t matter, but browsing the web without adblock is simply painful.

It turns out that Ubuntu has adblock plus in their universe repository, so the workaround is quite simple. Instead of attempting to install adblock directly from the webpage, do a:

$ sudo apt-get install adblock-plus

instead.

This advice applies generally too — checking apt for firefox extensions before installing them directly off the web seems preferable because of the possibility for breakage.

achiang@soy:~$ apt-cache search firefox | grep extension | awk '{print $1}'
firefox-greasemonkey
firefox-webdeveloper
libhtml-widgets-selectlayers-perl
lightning-extension-locale-nb-no
mozilla-beagle
mozilla-biofox
mozilla-bookmarksftp
mozilla-firefox-adblock
mozilla-firefox-webdeveloper
scrapbook
torbutton-extension
« — »

3 Comments

  1. Wayne — April 8, 2008 #

    My contribution to your geekiness:

    http://lifehacker.com/376551/the-complete-field-guide-to-testing-firefox-3

  2. alex — April 8, 2008 #

    Yeah, normally, I’m not on the bleeding edge of browsers, but Ubuntu decided to upgrade me forcibly. ;)

    Those solutions are ok for the “other” OSes; I think the “create new profile” solution might work for Linux too, but I haven’t tried.

    Really, the easiest thing for Ubuntu users is to install the package, after which hopefully the dependencies will be worked out correctly.

  3. Matt — April 11, 2008 #

    If you want to live on the edge, here’s a another work-around:

    1) Open about:config in the location bar
    2) Add a new boolean key called extenstions.CheckCompatibility and set it to False
    3) Restart FF

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