Firefox; What am I missing?

[Rex A. Butcher]

What ho one and all,

I really do not see the purpose of Firefox any longer. In the days of yore, it worked fine, i could install the add-ons that I wanted, usually with no trouble.

For reasons that I do not understand, because I have auto update set to off, my older version had recently up-dated itself to FF43 and now, most of the add-ons are reported as incompatible. Bookmark backup / British Dictionary / BrowserProtect / Download Helper / Tabbrowser Pref / Spell Checker. / Ad-Block, etc. All disabled. I know that Mozilla do the upgrade and it is up to the add-on developers to follow, but this seems a pointless exercise, unless it is to keep a lot of folks employed!

So I guess I will do a OS restore to get back to FF24 ESR that was actually working reasonably well.

Bummer!

Rex

[Midknyte]

I'll take a crack since no one else replied.

Did you try a clean Firefox profile? I've already told you about Portable Firefox in the past. Download the latest ESR and see if you have the same problems. If that works, then something in your profile could be messing up.

http://portableapps.com/apps/interne...x-portable-esr

Did you make any changes to about:config? about:config settings can change between versions.

It might also be one of your old addons. Disabling the addons in safe mode may not revert all their changes.

The reason you should be updating FF is for security. Some sites are dropping support for older browsers by looking at the UA settings. There isn't anything you can do on your end, except for updating the browser.

If your FF updated, you might have installed the FF Maintenance service. You can try uninstalling that.

[HAN]

For quite some time, for safety's sake, Mozilla has been moving toward "signed" add-ons/extensions. Here is an article from last Feb https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015...er-experience/

Because I updated all my extensions as Firefox updated, the signed version is what I ended up with and I lost none of them at all. There were a couple (LastPass being one) that had to be deleted and re-installed at one point. But in general, it was painless. If any of your extensions/add-ons were not signed, they would be automatically disabled with no means to enable them. The only recourse is to delete them and re-install them.

As Midknyte notes, running with older internet browsers on Windows can be a dangerous game if you are trying to keep the PC clean from browser exploits. I know it sounds like a broken record (I know... what's a record?? ) But it really is important. I update my key browsers, Firefox and Chrome, the same day that updates/patches are released. I'm not willing to take any security risks at all.

[Midknyte]

I know it sounds like a broken record (I know... what's a record?? )

I would say a scratched CD, but even that sounds archaic nowadays.

I've mentioned the security side before, but running XP with an outdated browser is ill advised.

This would be a good time to review your addons and see if you really need them. There might be better replacements/substitutions available now.

[foxy]

For the ones that don't update automatically, find their pages on AMO and D/L the new version. And LastPass required a new manual install. All of mine, about 25, are working now on FF 43.0.3.