I only have a couple of add-ons or extensions installed because Firefox is already a memory hogger. They are Google Toolbar, LastPass and Lazarus. The features that I find very useful in the Google Toolbar is Translate. It enables me to easily translate words or even the whole webpage from a foreign language to English. Other than that I can easily access my Gmail by clicking on the Gmail icon and also to view pagerank of a site. There are also many other useful features such as the spell checker and bookmarks. So far whenever I update Firefox to the latest version, the Google Toolbar is definitely compatible with it.
However, since the Mozilla Firefox team is following the Google Chrome footsteps in releasing major version number updates much faster, for the first time the Google Toolbar is unable to keep up the compatibility with Firefox 5.0. If you click on the Update Firefox button at the Firefox Software Update window, the next thing you will see is the notification of Incompatible Add-ons Found with Google Toolbar for Firefox listed there. Clicking the OK button will proceed with downloading Firefox 5.0. During the update process, Firefox again will show that the Google Toolbar is incompatible.
Clicking the Check Now button is pretty much useless for now because Firefox will tell you that it is unable to find updates to your incompatible add-ons.
Go to the Add-ons Manager and you will find that there is no way to force Firefox to enable the Google Toolbar.
There are three solution to this problem. First is to wait for Google to update the toolbar so that it is compatible with Firefox 5.0.
If you don’t want to wait, you can either downgrade to Firefox 4.0.1 by downloading from this official Firefox download link or install an add-on called “Add-on Compatibility Reporter“.
The Add-on Compatibility Reporter add-on will force the incompatible add-on to work with Firefox. All you need to do is install the add-on, restart Firefox TWICE (first time is to install the add-on and second time is to disable the compatibility restriction), and the disable incompatible add-ons will be automatically enabled. It is that easy and nothing else needs to be done. I can verify that the incompatible Google Toolbar works fine with Firefox 5.0. Try it at your own risk if you cannot live without Google Toolbar and you want to use Firefox 5.