Firefox 3.0.1-Google Gears not compatible

[Kirk M]

I've been testing the build 1 candidate of Firefox 3.0.1 and found that Google Gears is no longer compatible with this build. This is actually pretty bad since almost all WordPress site owners depend on Firefox to administer their WordPress powered sites (it's a nasty experience using IE). Ironically enough, WordPress 2.6 is due to be released on July 14th (Monday) and this new release is now directly compatible with Google Gears which will be used to cache all the CSS, theme files and Java scripts that are used in the WP Administration pages.

This worked very well with Firefox 3.0 and using Gears to store a local cache of the WP Admin, it not only sped up navigating through the Admin's various pages (great for those with slow connections) but also took a some of the load off the site owners server (great for shared hosting). Unfortunately, Gears is installed using the Google setup engine rather than as a normal extension .xpi file so it's "unhackable" so to speak. Nightly Tester Tools re-enables Gears but not the functionality of it.

Has anyone else been using Google Gears with Firefox 3.0 and might be willing to test it against the latest build of 3.0.1 in order to confirm what I'm seeing?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

[Ted Mielczarek]

IIRC, Gears specified a maxVersion of "3.0" in their install.rdf, so it's just a problem with their install.rdf. They should have specified "3.0.*".

[Kirk M]

Hi Ted,

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Firefox extensions are normally installed into your Firefox profile including the "install.rdf" file. Google Gears is installed as a regular program and only the caches and DB files are located in your Firefox profile. The actual "operating" folders and files are located (in Windows) under "Program Files" which includes the "install.rdf" and changing the max version from "3.0" to "3.0.*" has made no difference in the problem. Gears still dead in the water (Nice try though). The current version of Gears appears to incompatible with 3.0.1 because of the changes that 3.0.1 brings. If I'm telling you things you already know, please excuse.

Good news though...

I got word from the "Gears Users" group yesterday afternoon via Aaron Boodman that he is pushing out the next version of Google Gears early and in time for the release of 3.0.1:

I released Gears 0.3.24.3, which is marked for compatibility with
Firefox 3.0.*, to 1% of public users Friday afternoon. I plan to
increase that to 10% then 100% over the next few days, in time for the
Wednesday afternoon schedules release of Firefox 3.0.1.

Currently there's a build out for debugging.

This is certainly a good thing since WordPress.com and WordPress 2.6 (due today) are Gears enabled.

[the-edmeister]

Kirk,

I am not familiar with Google Gears and I don't completely understand how those files can be created in the Profile folder without an extension being installed, but since that program installs 'stuff' into your Profile changing the "install.rdf" MaxVersion in "Program Files" might not be enough. There might be an entry in the extensions.rdf file in your Profile which might still have the old "3.0" value - that file has data from the install.rdf files for installed extensions.

Try deleting the extensions.rdf, the extensions.ini, and the extensions.cache files while Firefox is closed, and they will be re-created when Firefox is started.


Ed

[Kirk M]

Hey Ed,

Thanks for the advice and I can give it a try. Considering that the update to Gears should be out in a couple of days it's not urgent but I'm an old troubleshooter from way back and rather obsessive about fixing things. Wish I could get over that.

Google Gears isn't the only add-on (meaning extension in this case) for Firefox that doesn't install as an .xpi file. One of them is a Windows Live Writer (WLW) add-on called "BlogThis for Firefox" that allows you to take snippets of text and whatnot off any web page your viewing in Firefox and automatically send them to WLW (It's a locally installed blog editor). This comes as a .msi file and installs as you would any other Windows program. It adds what it needs to function into your Firefox profile and drops an icon on the Firefox toolbar but like Gears, the "install.rdf" file is located within the program's directory in "Program Files" and you can disable it but not uninstall it via the Add-ons Manager, you have to use the Windows "Add/Remove Programs" applet to uninstall the program itself. Unlike Gears, you can change the "max version #" in the "install.rdf" file itself and it will work properly which tells me that Gears may require an update to the actual program code to be compatible with 3.0.1.

Not arguing your point, just thinking out loud.

[Bluefang]

It's entirely possible that the 'extension' is installed in a location other than the profile. For example, it would make sense to me that a windows installer would install extensions globally, via the Firefox install folder, so you may want to check there.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions

[Ted Mielczarek]

Yeah, it doesn't matter how they install, they still use an install.rdf at some point, and the only problem here is that they didn't specify compatibility with 3.0.1, not that anything changed that would break them.