Magazine · 2011
AddOn Development in Firefox
Vassilios Karakoidas
A Greek magazine tutorial on writing Firefox add-ons, making the case that the barrier is much lower than people assume — it is XML and JavaScript, and little else.
- Published in
- Linux Inside (Greek), 2011
- Citations
- Not indexed by Google Scholar.
- Cite as
- LX11-3
What it covers
Firefox let users extend the browser from its earliest versions, and the usual assumption about add-on development — arcane APIs, a specialised toolchain — does not hold here: beyond the boilerplate needed to register the add-on, what you need is XUL, which is XML, and JavaScript. The piece walks through generating a skeleton with the Add-on Builder from the Firefox developer centre, and shows that the result installs and runs as it comes, a working add-on that does nothing yet.
Where it sits
Part two takes the skeleton apart and gives it an interface.
Written from the paper itself — the PDF linked above, which this site hosts.