about:mozilla » Add-ons

Ubiquity tutorial: turn bookmarklets into commands

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:42:25 +0000

Aza Raskin has put together a short video tutorial on how to turn your Firefox bookmarklets into Ubiquity commands. “Bookmarklets are clickable actions (technically a link containing some Javascript) that can be added to the bookmarks bar of your browser. They’re a good way of getting control of the web back into users’ hands, by allowing them to add whatever new functionality they want to the websites they visit. The main problem with bookmarklets is that they don’t provide a scalable solution for accessing their functionality. You can only have so many buttons on the toolbar before they become unusable.” There’s a new utility function in Ubiquity that makes it trivial to turn any bookmarklet into a Ubiquity command, and Aza’s video tutorial shows you how to do it.

Add-on developers: It’s that time again

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:25:16 +0000

Justin Scott writes, “With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed [at the Mozilla Developer Center]. 3.1.b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.” For more information you should check out Justin’s blog post.

Add-on developers survey: raw results

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:43:38 +0000

The team responsible for the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site recently conducted a survey of the add-on developer community. A total of 265 people responded to the survey, and the initial results have been published. “The general summary is that most respondents were individual developers with 2 or more years of add-on development experience. Naturally they felt comfortable with JavaScript and XUL. They primarily built add-ons for Firefox and hosted them on their own.” The full results have been published, but they are simply the raw results. The team will be applying some correlation analysis to draw out more interesting findings and conclusions. To view and discuss these initial results, see the post on Basil’s weblog.

Weave: the story so far

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:09:59 +0000

Dan Mills has written an extensive update about the status of the Mozilla Labs “Weave” project, outlining the project’s background, its current state, and setting up some questions about its potential future. “We think Weave still has a long way to go, and the real questions are: What do we need to do to get closer to our vision? What are the main problem areas right now? And, do we need to revisit any old decisions? Now that we’ve been running this experiment for a while, I think we can begin answering those questions.” Dan’s post goes on to discuss some of the major issues facing the project, which he’ll continue to expand upon in an upcoming post. You can read the full text of his current post over on his weblog.

AMO Developer tools ready for testing

deb — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:18:32 +0000

Justin Scott has been writing about the development of new tools for addons.mozilla.org, and has now announced that those tools are ready for testing. “On the en-US Developer Tools index, you should now see an invitation to try out the new tools, which will take you to the new ‘Developer Dashboard’. Using the old index will continue using the old tools until the next update when we intend to make the tools the default and only tools.” There’s also a test site available, where you can play around with the new tools without causing changes on the live AMO site. For details about the various new tools you should read Justin’s previous posts, all of which are linked in his blog post.

Latest about:addons newsletter

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:55:11 +0000

The Mozilla Add-ons team has published the latest issue of the monthly about:addons newsletter, bringing you the latest and greatest news and information from the world of Mozilla Add-on development. You can read the full newsletter at the Mozilla Developer Center and sign up to have future issues sent directly to your mailbox using the handy subscription form.

nsITraceableChannel, Intercept HTTP traffic

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:52:00 +0000

Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (“new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator”) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.

Firefox add-ons developer survey

deb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:16:57 +0000

The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is looking for help as they work on improving the add-on development experience. “If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox (or other applications), we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read. We’ll summarize the findings in a few weeks.” Add-ons are a vital part of the Firefox ecosystem, so any help you can provide here would be hugely beneficial to the project as a whole — Add-ons Developer Survey.

Language-based interfaces

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:57:07 +0000

Jonathan DiCarlo has been writing a series of blog posts discussing language-based interfaces — interfaces that allow you type commands in real language and the right stuff happens. “What would the web be like if you could tell it what you want to do as easily as you currently tell it where you want to go?”

Mozilla Labs has started experimenting with linguistic interfaces that are designed to do just that, the first of which is the recently-launched Ubiquity project. Jonathan’s posts are an extensive look into the concepts, questions, and thinking behind the experiments, and he has written three so far: Language-based interfaces: The problem, Language-based interfaces: Where do we stand now?, and Language-based interfaces: Report card for Ubiquity. If you’re at all interested in these approaches and ideas you should read Jonathan’s blog, and then head over to the Ubiquity project to get involved with the growing community working on these experiments.

Mobile Firefox, now with add-ons

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:34:15 +0000

The recent release of Fennec (the code name for Mobile Firefox) Milestone 7 included the revolutionary addition of an Add-ons manager for the mobile browser. Mark Finkle has written a detailed post that talks about developing add-ons for Fennec, explaining its various similarities and differences to Firefox. “Fennec is a XULRunner application and gives extension developers access to the same underlying XPCOM system that is used in Firefox. The process of building extensions is the same as for any other Mozilla based application.”

There are significant differences, as well. “Fennec is not Firefox. It is a completely different application. Fennec’s UI is also very different than Firefox. This means you can’t just plop a Firefox (or Thunderbird or Songbird) extension into Fennec and expect anything to work. There are some basic things an extension developer will need to handle when making or porting extensions to Fennec.” These differences include: a different application id, a very different XUL UI, and different JavaScript objects and functions in the UI code among other things.

Mark suggests that currently the best way to figure out what’s available is to look at the source code. If you have questions, jump into Mozilla IRC’s #mobile channel, and someone there should be able to help you out. Mark also includes some example Fennec extensions, which you can find linked in his blog post.