New FireGSS version for Firefox 4.0

FireGSS is the desktop client of gss and the Pithos service, in the form of a Firefox extension. Yesterday, I tested it on Firefox 4.0 for the first time (a little bit late, I know). All looked well, except two things: a) The version number in the about box was displayed as ... undefined! and b) all menus were something like transparent (definitely not usable).

What 's wrong?!? Firebug and chromebug to the rescue! Firebug console displayed an error message in line


var extManager = Cc["@mozilla.org/extensions/manager;1"].getService(Ci.nsIExtensionManager);


It seems that Firefox 4.0 has changed the way to programmaticaly access the extensions manager. The new way is

Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/AddonManager.jsm"); //Load AddonManager
AddonManager.getAddonByID("addon id", function (addon) {
//Do something with your addon, we get the version number here
});

As you see, the new way is asynchronous and uses a callback function to return the results. That required some refactoring on our part to make sure that the about box is not displayed before we have the version number.

The second problem was that we defined the menus as popup elements inside a popupset element. Another thing that is no longer supported in 4.0 is the popup element as it has been replaced by the menupopup.

So after those changes the plugin was playing well with Firefox 4.0 but no longer with 3.*. Since it does not have any other functionality enhancements, this is not a problem. Users of Firefox 3.* can continue using FireGSS v. 0.18 and users of Firefox 4.0 can upgrade to 0.19.

Until we resolve some issue with the update site, you can manually update to version 0.19 by downloading from here.