Firefox Extensions
One of the things I think I like most about the web browser Mozilla Firefox is the flexibility of using extensions to give you more features. Some of my current favorites are the Google Calendar extension that shows you’re calendar events in the status bar. The Gmail notifier is also a favorite of mine. It’s really the kind of thing that has saved me some time in my daily routine by putting information in plain view without having to open up a new web browsing tab and log in and then check. It helps me to use my time better.
I’ve toyed around with a few ideas for my own firefox extensions and who knows, this may be the page I post them in the future. For now though, I wanted to collect my references here for how to go about writing a firefox extension.
From lifehacker: how to write a firefox extension. Good general overview with links to a few other resources. Includes a great tip to manage separate profiles to do your extension developing so you don’t trash your default profile. (Plan for the worst, hope for the best…)
This how to is probably quite dated now that we’re up to firefox 3.0 but it was one of the first “how to create firefox extension guides out there and may still have some use.
Mozilla of course has a “building an extension” page. This really should be THE authoritative source…
There is a great extension wizard online that will help you construct a skeleton for a new extension which should make getting a new one started a bit quicker than a manual construction of the folder/file structure.
To make life easier there’s also an extension developers extension which packages some tools to make your life easier if you’re writing firefox extensions.
Here is a link to XUL Planet. XUL is the XML markup flavor that firefox uses to build the menu items and dialog boxes that you’ll see in the browser.
Mozillazine’s extension development tutorials.
Mozillazine also has a tutorial on getting started with extension development.
Some people have put together their lists of top firefox extensions.