Grepular

FireGPG is a Firefox addon which adds PGP functionality to the browser. It automatically detects PGP signed/encrypted content in a page and provides the ability to decrypt/verify it. It also provides simple functionality to encrypt and sign data inside forms. Unfortunately, development was discontinued in June last year; it seems that Maximilien Cuony (the creator) didn’t have either the time, or the inclination to work on it anymore.

To prevent the code and commit history from disappearing, it was imported into Github. In March of this year, Firefox v4 was released, and FireGPG stopped working. About five weeks later, a developer known as “bit“, submitted a pull request for Firefox v4 support, which was then integrated into the main repository. Firefox v5 was released about two weeks ago, causing the addon to break yet again. Thankfully, “bit” has taken the time to fix it again, and released a fix two days ago.

To get FireGPG working with Firefox v5, you can pull it down using git, and then link to it from your Firefox profile. It’s not yet in the main repository, so you may have to download from bit’s fork instead like this:

mkdir ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone git://github.com/bit/firegpg.git
cd YOUR_FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIRECTORY/extensions/
echo "~/git/firegpg" > firegpg@firegpg.team

Then restart Firefox

Substitute “bit” in the url above for “firegpg” once the pull request has been honoured. The location of the profile directory is different depending on the operating system. On Macs it can be found in a directory similar to this:

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/**A_CODE**.**A_NAME**/extensions/

It’s a shame that FireGPG isn’t getting any active development, but I appreciate the work that people are doing to at least keep it working with new releases of Firefox, and I definitely appreciate the three years of work that the Maximilien himself put into creating it.