Making the Switch to Firefox 3 Beta 3

By Josh | February 14, 2008

As you may know, Firefox 3 Beta 3 was released this week, so I thought I’d install it and see if it was stable enough for me to use. Of course, there are still a lot of addons that don’t work yet, but there is a way around this which I’ll discuss below. So far I am enjoying using Firefox 3 Beta 3. It seems to load pages quicker, and the new features are a nice addition.

Forcing your addons to work:
Addons are one of the main reasons why I use Firefox, so when I first installed Firefox 3 Beta 3 I forced all of my addons to work. (Note: forcing your addons to work is not recommended since they have not yet been updated to work with Firefox 3. However, if you really want them to work, then this trick should make most of them work.) There are a couple of tweaks that you need to add to Firefox in order for your addons to work. (Via Lifehacker)

Type about:config in the address bar and then click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
Now create a new boolean by right clicking anywhere and choosing New>Boolean. Name the new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
Make another new boolean named extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
Restart Firefox.

Now, most of your addons should work. You might get some weird things happening since some of them aren’t designed for Firefox 3, so you’ll have to disable the ones that don’t work well. If you use Google Gears, you’ll most likely have to disable it. Google Gears would make Firefox crash everytime I tried to visit Google Reader. Also, if you use a different theme, you may have to disable it or find a new one. The theme I used made everything distorted, so I had to use a different one.

A nice theme for Firefox 3 that I’m using is Littlefox. I used to use Minifox, but it doesn’t work right with Firefox 3. I like the compact themes since they help to conserve space. There are some other themes that work with Firefox 3, you’ll just have to search around for them.