Firefox Extension Development

Firefox is a much opener platform to build Web intelligent agents than IE is. I will collect some materials about firefox extension development in this post for reference:

1. A good place to start and here

2. For my final class at RIT I had to create a Firefox extension using XUL, CSS, and Javascript. Just to shake things up around here, I decided to post the tutorial about its development here instead of on a standalone website. I know that extension development may not be your cup of tea, but maybe you'll find some of it interesting. Here we go! More...

3. I've been playing around with Firefox extension development lately and am finding the experience a little mixed. On the plus side it seems like a powerful interface that allows for many cool extensions. On the other hand, the documentation is somewhat lacking in real world examples and the development can be tedious because of silent runtime errors. More Tips

4. Extensions allow programmers to add new features to Mozilla applications or allow existing features to be modified. Typically, extensions modify the “chrome” of their target application?the user interface and the scripts that add functionalty to that interface. However, it is also possible for extensions to include compiled code in the form of XPCOM components. More comprehensive reference...

Before start to program firefox/mozilla, get the following tools:

• Mozilla 1.6 + jslib + XULMaker 0.51 (the current version, by 23-Mar-2005): very good visual xul editor
• Component View (cview extension): easy to query all interfaces provided by Mozilla
• DOM Inspector
• Reference: mozilla_book and xul-planet

To use native codes in extensions, see how to Creating a C++ XPCOM component