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Firefox Hacking

The following are modifications of firefox with a mix of bookmarklets, Greasemonkey scripts (coming soon), and extensions that I have made or modified. I did them because I wanted functionality.


NYUD (Corel Cache) Mirror Bookmarklet

Due to people posting links to geocites and other free hosting on Hack-a-Day
there was a reash of PAGE UNAVAILABLE. Thanks to this I make a bookmarklet that will take anypage and link to the NYUD mirror. It adds the ".nyud.net:8090" and then links to it. You can save it below or cut and paste into a bookmark. Bookmark the following:

NYUDit

code: javascript:{var urlstring=document.location.href.toString(); substring1 = urlstring.substring(7,urlstring.length);indexOfSlash = substring1.indexOf('/'); sub2 = substring1.substring(0,indexOfSlash); sub3 = substring1.substring(indexOfSlash, substring1.length); locationURL = 'http://' + sub2 + '.nyud.net:8090' + sub3; document.location.href=locationURL;}


Make Firefox allow old versions of an extension.

This has probably happened to you before. You try and install and extension but firefox says that it is to old and not compatible. Most of the time they are it is just that the author hasn't updated the install files to reflect the new browser version. So lets do it for them.

Save an extension to your computer where you have access to edit the files. Right click on the "install now" link and say save as. Note that in this example at the top it says that 1.0.4 is the max. All well and good if you are using firefox. But what about us Nightly Build users. Well like all beta people we will forge ahead AND THE BROKEN EXTENSIONS BE DA  ... ahem ... moving on.
Right CLick and save as

Now that you have saved the file to a folder you will need to get inside. Wait a minute, you think, its a xpi format. How do we do that? Easy. Change the extension. Now the trouble lies in the fact that Windows XP hides the extensions by default. We will need to change this. You are probably thinking "why" because you can see the .xpi extension but once you change it you will not be able. Open up "My Documents" click "Tools" click "Folder Options" go to the "View" tab. Uncheck the "hide known extension types" box.
View Setting

Now that thats done we can begin to hack away. First rename the extension from .xpi to .zip. Thats right. XPI files are no more than zip files (sorta, they have certian switches and the such but who care it works this way for what we are doing). So lets get in there. Extract out just the install.rdf file and lets fix that hang up.

Open up the install.rdf and look for the line: <em:maxVersion>XXXX</em:maxVersion>
change this to <em:maxVersion> 2.0+ </em:maxVersion> or equal to the version number of the firefox you intend to use then theand save the file somewhere near the Zip file.

Now copy into the zip file the edited install.rdf replacing the one there.

Rename the .zip to .xpi and you are ready to install.

In firefox do a File > Open browse to the edited XPI file. The install file should come up and install the extension. If the browser crashes then use the safemode and uninstall the extension. Have fun taking back your extensions.

Play Launch

NOTE: This is now outdated and is no longer viable. The author has discontiunued the project. He is recommending that users switch to the GreaseMonkey script pkLaunch. This is the story of what I did just for sake of being here.

Around June of 2005 I got to looking at the Play-Launch extension and found that on windows it did not work quite right. The process was quite complex to get it working. I simply took and started playing around. I found the popup was just a link to the movie. I went and added code to place an Embed tag and then windows and linux could take advantage of the yahoo videos. Contacted the author and he got the extension changed.

Then yahoo got strict with thier access to the files and it be came a game of broken and patched cycle. That was a pain for the author and after a while he gave up fighting yahoo. It was no longer as simple as changing the link. pkLaunch has taken on the task of tricking yahoo that went beyond what the Play-Launch author intended to do. Below is the original announcement:

Play-Launch:
Now with an embeded player!
Created:6/28/05
MPv1
Click on a picture to see the actual size

I spent a good deal of time working on this hack. It was mainly javascript modifycations but it would be fun to make the thing look like the real Yahoo! Launch MP. The picture shows the new option and the dynamicly sized popup window with embeded media player.
Tested on: WINDOWS XP
play-launch-0.2.2r1.xpi


End of page. More posted when made. Last Modified: 1/05/2006
(c) 2005 -- Hal Hockersmith

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