After having declared my undying love for the Googlebar in Firefox, I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 RC1 (released yesterday) and found that the googlebar doesn’t work. After some quick reading I found an enterprising fellow who figured out how to hack it. So here’s the instructions in more detail:

1. Download the google toolbar XPI file here.
2. Rename the file to a “.zip” extension.
3. Unzip the file to a temporary directory.
4. Using your favourite text editor, edit the “index.rdf” file, and look for the line <em:maxVersion>1.4.1</em:maxVersion>. Change the 1.4.1 to 1.5
5. Using Winzip, recreate the original zip file with the new index.rdf.
6. Rename the “.zip” file to “.xpi”
7. Open the file using Firefox. Restart Firefox after the installation.

And Voila, you have the googlebar working in Firefox 1.5 RC1. Please note that this is a hack, it’s entirely unsupported by Google.