The simplest thing is to point out what Moonchild and others have pointed out often - it is the extension's job to become compatible with the browser and not the other way round. If you want an abandoned extension to work, step up and contribute as I did.
*self promo ahead*
I found the original PureURL for Firefox really useful - where it sucked was the user interface (non-existent for all practical purposes). Specifically, there was no way to know if stripping URL parameters was the reason that a site broke until disabling all extensions one by one to isolate PureURL. So the one you see on the addons site uses the original regex parser for filtering, but it was originally an addon SDK 'restartless' extension that I converted to XUL and added logging, the options dialog and the URL expansion feature.
*self promo ahead*
I found the original PureURL for Firefox really useful - where it sucked was the user interface (non-existent for all practical purposes). Specifically, there was no way to know if stripping URL parameters was the reason that a site broke until disabling all extensions one by one to isolate PureURL. So the one you see on the addons site uses the original regex parser for filtering, but it was originally an addon SDK 'restartless' extension that I converted to XUL and added logging, the options dialog and the URL expansion feature.