Firefox 3.5 was released to the masses on June 30th and as usual certain extensions have since come up as incompatible. And as usual the Mozilla blame game is afoot with a number of Firefox users complaining that one or more of the 30 (more or less) extensions they have installed are no longer compatible and why the heck didn’t Mozilla take care of this while 3.5 was still in testing?
Why?
Because Mozilla is not responsible for extension compatibility, that’s why.
Now most Firefox users probably know this but there’s a very vocal group who apparently don’t. While I can understand that finding your favorite extension no longer usable can be very aggravating it’s rather important to make sure you know where you’re aiming before you start shooting flame and blame. As to who’s responsible for what is rather simple really:
Mozilla is responsible for Firefox development, security and bug fixing, that’s it.
Extension authors are responsible for their respective extension(s), even if it’s Google.
Mozilla decided to build an extension framework into their browser long ago but left it up to third party programmers to make use of it. Mozilla was good enough to host these extensions and later provided a set of standards that these extension authors must adhere to in order for their extension to be hosted. But Mozilla is neither responsible for any extension downloaded from the Firefox Add-ons site nor that any given extension is compatible with any particular version of Firefox.
As it stands, the majority of the most popular extensions were already updated before the final release date. Even many of the close seconds haven’t had a problem with 3.5 but for any extension that hasn’t been updated you’ll need to contact the extension’s author directly.
Hi!
I have a lot of extension installed in my Firefox 3.5 and there are some which only compatible up to Firefox 2, but I can use it all and there’s no problem with their functionality or compatibility.
You can also make all your favorite but outdated extension compatible with Firefox 3.5 again just install Nightly Tester Tools: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543 and “override all compatibility” in the extensions window.
Good Luck! Cheers! Feri
Feri – Welcome to GMG. Good point about the Nightly Tester Tools add-on. Used it myself when testing out trunk builds of Firefox and Thunderbird 3.0 (Shredder). You have to be careful though when forcing compatibility since forcing doesn’t necessarily mean an outdated extension will work with the latest version of Firefox. But then we have Safe Mode if things go awry don’t we?