British Dictionary for FirefoxI know that the Add-ons for Firefox are created by volunteers but the organisation does itself no favours by allowing a fundamental extension go out of date. In most cases there is nothing wrong with the extension, just that the install package is out of date specifying a maximum version older than the current one. This has happened with the British English Dictionary so I have made available a hacked copy here.
Update: 10 Aug 2009: British English Dictionary 1.19.99.1 Now supports Firefox 3.5+
Update: 24 Feb 2010: British English Dictionary 1.19.99.2 Now supports Thunderbird 3.0+.
Webmaster
Good evening, Rick Parsons.
Thank you very much for this fix.
Regards,
Christopher Beeston
It is a pleasure to be of help.
This still seems to be a problem. Shame of mozilla for this and thanks for making this fixed version available.
It won’t install this fix. TB expects an xpi file: when I try to use the install.js file, it says “not a valid install package”.
I am not sure what you mean, Flumbo. The link I have provided is to
british_english_dictionary1.19.99fxzmtb.xpiDespite the link apparently pointing to an xpi file in fact, when downloading, it saves it as:
british_english_dictionary1.19.99fxzmtb.zip
Why is that?
Hmmm. I have seen this happen before and it is a “feature” of some browsers or systems and the way they interpret the mime types as sent by the server I think. It is because an XPI file is really a zip under another name but what is at fault I have no idea. Downloading with Firefox itself is generally ok.
It is nothing to worry about as you can just rename the file to what it should be and then it works just fine.
Thanks. Spent quite a bit of time trying to install the dictionary for ‘Firefox’ on one of our computers after successfully installing it from ‘Firefox Add Ons’ on another which worked first time. Both are running the same OS (Vista)
I am most grateful to you for taking the time to supply this fix.
Interesting all this: unlike others, I had no problem at all with the one provided by Mozilla. See my comment there [izziwizziletsgetbizzi]. I assume DB has the same version of Vista on those systems and not Vista64 on one and 32 on the other, or Home Premium on one and Basic on other, or perhaps sp1 on one but not on the other, etc etc…? If DB has *identical* OS’s on both his systems and uses Firefox as his browser, I will be forced to conclude that something else is awry. Possibly a firewall or antivirus program. He could actually help Mozilla by comparing and contrasting his systems…
I don’t understand why some people seem to be able to use the raw version downloaded from addons.mozilla.org
I can see that the blurb says Firefox 2.0 – 3.0.* but have just got a fresh copy and looked inside and it still clearly says maxVersion 2.0b2 in the install.rdf file so it shouldn’t work with Firefox 3.
So I stand by my version.
Thanks for the help. Although the download itself did not fix the problem, the clue to “play around” with the install.rdf did. I wanted to get the British Dictionary to run on an older version of Thunderbird (2.0.0.9) and had to change the file to: 2.0.0.9b2 (of course in both lines) ;-))
Anyway, thanks again for the helpful “soggy blog”! Much appreciated
And now, with Firefox 3.5, it’s invalid again 🙁
Thanks for pointing that out Ben. I have fixed it now. The odd thing is that if you already have it installed and update Firefox, it doesn’t notice that it is no longer valid. If you download it again then that should work until they release FF 4.
I reinstalled windows, so Firefox wouldn’t reinstall my British dictionary.
The creator of the dictionary should really edit the source file to allow 3.5.3 as the max version.
Cheers mate, this is a big help.
There may be something more than just the version number that is wrong, as I edited the rdf file and it still does not work. Yet the Aussie version installs fine.
The RDF for 1.19.99.1 is already set for all versions of Firefox 3.* (and Thunderbird 2.* and SeaMonkey 1.*) so it should not need to be edited. If there is anything else wrong with it then it must be much deeper and I can’t fix it, however I have seen no problems with FF 3.5.3 – checking this posting from my random typing.
I’ve now managed to get this to install, but I’m not sure why.
I re-downloaded the zip from here, and as Rick said the rdf file should cover all versions without editing. I also turned off Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 which has proved troublesome with Firefox and Thunderbird updates, so perhaps that may have been involved.
Sorry, I meant “re-downloaded the xpi”
Thank you for this post
Excellent! Many thanks for doing this. You are a gentleman and a scholar, Sir.