I updated to the recent release of FFPortable via portableapps and noticed with this release that extensions which were not signed by devs were immediately removed from the browser, one of those extensions that I use daily happens to be Adobes Acrobat PDF extension, which lets you convert web pages into a pdf etc...
Well, I also know that I can go into the about:config section of Firefox and turn off this new extension signing feature, even when doing so I do not get my Adobe Acrobat plugin back..so I tried it on a local install of Firefox 32 bit and found out what the problem was/is. The portable apps version is launching the 64 bit binary of the app as opposed to the 32 bit which is probably where the plugin incompatibility comes in to play. Aside from that I've also been having some hanging and lagging issues with the 64 bit version as well.
So my question would be, how can I switch back to the 32 bit version? Do I just delete the 64 bit directory?
**edit**
Just as I suspected, found my answer here https://portableapps.com/comment/225674#comment-225674. I just removed the directory, it saved me the space I can use to update other apps, plus I never used a 64 bit version of Firefox not even locally, so I'm not missing out on anything here.
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Just a note that plugins are being deprecated and support will be dropped across all versions of Firefox next year for all plugins with the exception of Flash. The Flash Player installer for Windows installs both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the plugin on Windows x64 now, so Firefox Portable will always have flash available.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thats just heartbreaking to hear, especially after a piece of software you've paid for. Do you know if its just Mozilla doing away with these plugins, because I find it funny that Microsoft now wants to support plugins for edge and to now hear Mlzilla is doing away with them all together, so it looks like I may have to change my browser to either edge or chrome.
Microsoft is looking into doing extensions with Edge, as it currently has none. Google Chrome has extensions but dropped support for NPAPI plugins a while ago (it uses a built-in PPAPI Flash plugin for Flash content). Mozilla has announced that Firefox will be dropping binary plugins (Shockwave, Java, Unity, Adobe Reader, etc) by the end of 2016. Extensions will still be supported (AdBlock, uBlock, Downloaders, etc). Separately, Firefox's extensions will be transitioning to a new style similar to Chrome's... more limited in terms of featureset but sandboxed, more stable, and faster. This will cause some hiccups with some popular extensions.
You can still print to PDF from a browser using your purchased software. And there are some extensions that will save a web page to a PDF.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
For me, the real pain in the ass is that 3rd party PDF reader plugin is not supported, e.g., PDF-XChange editor. The default pdf.js doesn't have the option for dual page side-by-side display. This is REALLY painful for academic PDF reading, and since I use Zotero to organize thousands of PDF papers, I have no other options but to open PDF files inside Firefox. It looks like a previous version of pdf.js does have the functionality to display dual pages, but not for the current version.
You can either force 32-bit or ask your plugin provider to provide a 64-bit version. Note that the latter is unlikely as plugins will be dead within a year.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!