Monday, August 01, 2011

Enabling Xpather Firefox Plugin in Firefox 5 on Windows 7 after upgrading from Firefox 3.x

I have been messing around with the Selenium Testing. Again. I think if you have spent any amount of time trying to construct functional tests for your web applications you will have found that Firefox developer tools like the Xpather plugin indispensable. Well, I do. My problem recently was the fact that with an upgrade to Firefox 5 from 3.x this most useful of plugins was disabled.

Its original developer Viktor Zigo, much respect for his efforts, is taking time off so while wondering what to do to get it working in Firefox 5, I stumbled upon the plugin reviews
page and a particular comment stood out for me. It led me to a useful solution on how to get this plugin enabled on Firefox 5. Without further ado, here it is.

This part of the post assumes that you had the plugin installed and working previously in Firefox 3.x and are on Windows 7.


  • To get it working update the install.rdf file which can be found in your Windows 7 install at the following location:
    \Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\lszvse7r.default\extensions\{636fd8b0-ce2b-4e00-b812-2afbe77ee899}
    Do adjust your username and actual profile directory to take into account your install specifics.
  • Restart your Firefox and Xpather 1.4.5 should be now be re-enabled.