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.
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.
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
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