We all love Firefox add-ons and extensions. They are so easy to use, so useful that many of us can’t stay without them, and also easy to install…or not??
If you find a useful add-on at the Firefox Add-ons home page, you will find a green button that you simply click to install the extension. But sometimes, when an add-on is made by someone with his own web site they tend to store them on their servers, and offer the setup as regular XPI (extensions) or JAR (themes) files.
So what do you do when you find one of those two files and you want to install them?
There are two ways you can use:
- The first way, is to drag and drop the file/URL of the extension in the Add-ons manager (Tools>Add-ons). The normal installation window will show and you’ll be ready to install.
- The second way, is to modify a voice in the configuration page, to unhide a “secret” install button inside the Add-ons Manager:
Now you will have an Install button in the Add-ons Manager, that will enable you to browse your computer, and look for XPI and JAR files to easily install them.
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You make my day!
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This is awesome. So simple but nowhere mentioned. You are a magician.
Thanks for the tip.
THANKS A LOT
very very very very very thanksssss
Thanks for all the great tips – Here’s another way to install xpi’s: Instead of clicking the install button, right-click and save the xpi file to a folder on your hard drive. Then you can simply drag and drop the xpi file into a FF window and the install process begins as usual. . . I work in an environment where my laptop must be re-imaged frequently with a base image that I don’t control. By saving all my favorite extensions to a USB flash drive I can very quickly set up my FF environment with this method. Anyone who re-installs their OS frequently will also find this a great timesaver.
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Thanks.
We found it as a very good link to our project….thanx……
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this is great. Thanks especially on the second tip.
Still says incompatible extension. This don’t work for me.
Great explanation that helped in a jiff!
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Thank you Really !
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please help.
usually and before, .jar files on the addons site used to have the same installation window as .xpi files (installing addon/themes, but now it only brings up the default ‘save to’/open with window.
i’ve tried using another profile so i know it’s not because i recently updated.
thank you for reading and sorry to bother you.
Thank you, Very useful
Thank you…. I use nightly builds of mozilla ‘firefox’ (Aurora 12.0a2 at the moment.) and keeping up with the short version life is killing me. More times than not when editing the MaxVersion of a jar file, dragging and dropping on Add-ons forces dialog, ‘cancel or save’ and will not install… Adding extensions.hideInstallButton = false to config, even though it is not in most nightly builds or stable betas,,,, works… Thanks!
I may have been wrong and the option has been in the most recent nightly’s all the time and I didn’t notice. I set extensions.hideInstallButton to true and this button is still there, so until in set up another ‘fresh’ system (openSuSE / KDE / mozilla ‘nightly’) without mods, i wont know.
what the ‘button’ looks like in linux – mozill -’firefox’ nightly:
http://landisreed.com/images/screens/FireFox/FF-Aurora-Install-AddOns-05.03.12-01.png
still, ???????,
Landis.