"Help, my addons aren't working"

Add-ons for Pale Moon and other applications
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Starchild

"Help, my addons aren't working"

Unread post by Starchild » 2014-05-08, 07:22

tr;dl: Stop complaining you have an issue and figure out why you have the problem instead; It's the difference between saying Something isn't working and Something isn't working because X happens, I tried Y, what can I do to resolve X and have Z instead?.

I'm making this rather informative thread because I've seen this too many times elsewhere, and had been the cause of such threads myself, when the most ideal solution was to tinker around with other extensions, test interactions and try out other various settings until everything in my browser interacted as I wanted it to. So work through the following before reporting any issues about Pale Moon and extensions:

* First, understand that the majority of extensions are made free, and distributed freely. Even if you report a problem that is legitimate, know that it may not be resolved until the author receives spare time and expenditures, if at all.

* Some extensions may have bad interactions with others, causing -- at worse -- inaccessibility of certain menus and other features of the browser until that specific add-on is disabled. If that is the case, it is not necessarily a fault of Pale Moon; Try with some extensions disabled, all extensions disable, re-enabling them in small sets or with Firefox (either Portable or a desktop Firefox build) to see if it's an Pale Moon-specific issue.

* A majority of extensions are UI-agnostic (meaning not reliant on Australis or other bits of UI code), but others (such as Fission) are specially made to work on a certain version of Firefox; Anything above that version where things in the UI had been replaced / moved / otherwise tampered without your consent or knowledge, and the extension's functionality becomes broken. UI dependency is no fault of Pale Moon, and should be reported elsewhere as a Firefox-specific issue

* If an extension becomes UI-dependent (in this case, meaning it needs to use Australis), try an older version of that extension. Sure it might be missing some additions but it's better than nothing so long it works; Once you know an older version of a problematic extension works, instead of saying something is broken pass compatible version information to us, and request the author to rework the extension using a compatible older version, and adding either a "Legacy mode" or an "Australis mode"

Obsolete:
This will no longer help troubleshooting extensions because there no longer is a common extension framework between the two.
* The easiest way to see if an extension is causing browser-specific issues is to see if the same profile acts differently between browsers; Below is a generic profile.ini example from MozillaZine, for desktop build users:

Code: Select all

[General]

StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/qioxtndq.default
Set StartWithLastProfile=0, then add the following (example code, assuming you used defaults for Windows desktop installation):

Code: Select all

[Profile1]
Name=PaleMoon
IsRelative=0
Path=%appdata%/Moonchild Productions/Pale Moon/Profiles/fi94nu3h.default
Save, relaunch Firefox and use the new "PaleMoon" profile you specified; It should load Firefox using the Pale Moon profile, from there you can test interactions, close Firefox and open Pale Moon to test them again and compare the results. The reverse can be done, as well! Portable users (like myself) will have some difficulty setting stuff like this up, but it can be done with enough patience.
Important Warning: Since this post was made, Firefox has become very destructive to Pale Moon profiles, so if you want to do this, always make a copy of the Pale Moon profile and point Firefox to that copy. Using your "live" profile from Pale Moon will likely make it unusable in Pale Moon afterwards, so never do this!

So you're probably asking yourself, Why should I install Firefox again? You don't have to. You'll only want to if you grow tired of simply complaining and relying on somebody else to have a magic answer, and want to give yourself the power to help yourself, and in the process help others with similar issues.
Off-topic:
Thanks for the sticky Moonchild!
I also edited it to explain things a little more concisely. Late nights don't make for the best typing.
Last edited by Moonchild on 2019-10-11, 07:51, edited 2 times in total.

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