about:mozilla » Developer tools

Developer Tools and the Open Web

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:08:59 +0000

Mozilla Labs recently announced the formation of a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the Open Web. “We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.” Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the Open Web have joined Mozilla in a full-time capacity to lead the new project. For more information, please see the Mozilla Labs 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.

Mozdev turns eight years old

deb — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:19:41 +0000

The Mozdev team writes, “In September 2000 mozdev.org was launched as a site dedicated to supporting Mozilla application and extension developers. Over the last year we have continued to provide hosting for hundreds of active projects and there are now add-ons for over a dozen Mozilla-based applications. There are also new features and more updates coming that will make developing projects even easier. We would like to thank everyone who has contributed time, energy or money over the past 8 years and we look forward to another year of serving the Mozilla community.”

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.

Firebug 1.2 released

deb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:05:18 +0000

The final version of Firebug 1.2 has been released and will be up on the Mozilla Add-ons site today, and it is immediately available GetFirebug.com. There have been several improvements and a huge number of bug fixes made. Some of the major features in the release include Firefox 3 support, quality improvements, selective panel enablement, and the ability to suspend/resume Firebug. Firebug 1.3 development is already underway and is going to be focused on performance, quality, and testing. John Resig writes, “Firebug is the de facto tool for web developers and we need to make sure that its quality does not wane and that we tackle performance head-on.” For more information, see John’s blog post announcing the release.