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Thanks to garysimmons on Twitter who pointed to a Lifehacker article from the awesome Gina Trapani on how to force your old add-ons to work in the beta version of Firefox.
Big warning! You're removing a safety net when you do this. Be prepared to deal with bugs, crashes, and security risks if you do this.
OK. Here's how to do it.
Go to the Firefox address bar and type about:config.
Click the button promising to be careful.
You're promising to be careful...RIGHT?
Right-click anywhere on the screen, choose new, then Boolean.
Name your new preference extensions.checkCompatibility. Press OK. Then set it to false and press OK again.
Now right-click again anywhere choose New and Boolean and make the name of this one extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value of that one to false.
Great! You've just instructed Firefox not to check the validity of the extension and to tell update security to go take a flying leap.
If you're sure you want to do that, restart Firefox.
Now all your add-ons should load quite nicely. At least if they don't crash the whole browser. Don't forget you turned off the capability to ensure secure updates. So do be careful.
One last tip, several people wrote to me about the Add-on called Nightly Tester Tools. It allows you to use otherwise incompatible add-ons in beta versions, although it doesn't seem to get Firefox 2 add-ons to work in Firefox 3.
Like most Web browsers, Internet Explorer 8 has add-ons. But sometimes you may want to get rid of them, even if just temporarily. IE 8 has made it easier to disable and enable your add-ons. Here's how to do it.
Let's say you have the Google Toolbar running in IE 8. You should see an X to the left of the toolbar. It's the familiar X that usually means you can close something. In this case, you'd be right to guess that. Click that X and you'll disable the toolbar.
Now that can be dangerous if other add-ons rely on the one you're disabling. So IE 8 gives you a lovely list of any dependent add-ons and the option to disable them at the same time. Once you've made your selections, press the Disable button and the add-on will disappear.
What if you want it back?
Go to tools and select Manage Add-ons.
Select the type of add-on, in our example from above, it would be a toolbar.
Scroll down until you find your toolbar. And press enable.
IE 8 will suggest re-enabling any related add-ons you disabled earlier. Press enable again, then press close.
In the case of the toolbar, even though I had enabled it, it still didn't show up. I had to go to View, select toolbars and select the Google Toolbar to make it viewable.
If you want to browse through all the add-ons available for IE 8, visit www.ieaddons.com.
Go to addons.mozilla.org and search for SimpleSearch. While it's still in the experimental stage, you'll have to log in to use it.
After you've installed the add-on, go to a page on the Web and highlight a word. Right click and highlight the search option.
Choose the search engine you want.
And you'll be taken to that search.
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