Recovering from SiteAdvisor v23

I used to like SiteAdvisor, adding the extension to every instance of FireFox that I use. I liked it right up to the point where they introduced the Proxy Bug. Version 21 worked fine; but 23 causes FF to hang, window-less, on any FF that has its connection settings set to use a proxy server. Apparently McAfee knows about this problem, but doesn't consider those of us stuck with firewalls and proxy servers as worthy of the attention necessary to fix the problem.

So the solution I found is to revert back to version 21. Sounds simple, but in practice, it wasn't, which is why you might be interested to know how I did it.

Finding the old version:
This may not be easy. McAfee apparently doesn't want anyone getting their hands on previous versions, which, considering the mess they've made with the v23, is kind of obnoxious, but what can you expect? I don't dare to post it myself, but the file you are looking for is called 'safe.xpi' - version 21 is 48,997 bytes, version 20 is 41,518 bytes, and version (blecch!) v23 is 82,765 bytes. If you had installed previous versions, try digging through your hard drive, particularly "documents and settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temp" and look for any .xpi file of that size.

Fun with XPI files -
FF doesn't make it obvious how it handles extensions, but basically it works like this: if you click a link (in FF) that leads to an XPI file, FF downloads it to a temporary place and processes it. How? Turns out an XPI file is really just a ZIP file. Try opening the XPI with WinZip or WinRAR, etc. If the zip util complains about the filetype, make a copy of the XPI and change the extension to ZIP and see what happens. Anyway, once inside, you can recognize a SA extension by the "zigbert" files inside it.

If you want to grab an extension w/o having FF automatically trying to assimilate it, you can try the old right-click/save-as thing, but that doesn't always work. Another way is to drive your way to the link for the extension using FF, then open IE, copy the url over to IE, and just click the "install extension" link the regular way. IE will find the XPI file, but won't know what to do with it. That's when you tell it "save-as" and presto! You have the XPI file. You can install the extension into FF later (or on other machines) by just going to FF's File/Open-File option and navigating it to the XPI. When FF tries to open the XPI you automatically get the install behavior.

As I said, some sites try to make it difficult (cough!mcafee!ahem..) to get the actual file, by making the "install extension" link/button/etc go to some script that in turn goes and gets the file. So, if you want to nab v23 of safe.xpi, whatever you do, don't go to McAfee's site, and don't use the aforementioned IE trick because they don't want you to do that!

Out with the New ..
First, start FF in 'safe mode'. Chances are that on your start menu, under 'programs' and then 'mozilla firefox' you will find the shortcut to 'safe mode'. Start FF in safe mode, go to Tools, Extensions, right click the offending SA and choose 'uninstall'. If it throws a new browser window at you, you can ignore (close) it. Quit FF and restart it to make sure the uninstall script goes through all the way. Quit FF a 2nd time for good measure.

In with the Old -
Start FF. Go to File, choose Open File, and use the open file dialog to find the XPI file. Open it. You will have to quit FF and restart, as is usual installing FF extensions, but that should do it.