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Extension Development with FUEL

Removing obstacles for extension developers is my group’s primary task at Mozilla. There are lots of ways we can do this and areas include documentation, tutorials, samples and tools. One thing that becomes clear after watching and helping extension developers is the difficulty some have getting familiar with the Mozilla framework and the plethora of object and interfaces available. Not only are some of the concepts foreign, but in many cases there are no clear ways for extension developers to achieve their goals. There are places to get help. The Mozilla’s IRC channels are a great place to ask questions, especially #extdev.

We have also started work on a JavaScript library to help extension developers shorten the learning curve, feel more comfortable and generally be more productive. Codenamed FUEL, the library is primarily a wrapper around commonly used parts of the Mozilla framework which are unfamiliar or complicated. Some of the goals are:

  • Make it easy for developers to do common extension tasks.
  • Use terminology and interfaces familiar JavaScript developers.
  • Hide as many implementation details as possible.
  • Allow developers to get access to underlying XPCOM interfaces if they want to.
  • Act as a buffer between extensions and Firefox internals.

In addition to making it easier for extension developers, we also want to help improve the overall quality of Firefox. A broken extension appears to be a broken Firefox. Anything that can be done to help extensions avoid breakage and use clearly defined methods of hooking into the browser will help.

Currently, we (myself and John Resig) are in the planning and prototype phases. John’s JavaScript library experience (jQuery) is a huge plus for us. It’s great to have him working at Mozilla.

I invite you to take a look at the FUEL wiki pages and send us feedback and comments. You can use the discussion pages on the wiki or visit IRC (we hang out there way to much) or even use the newsgroup thread.

Update: I forgot to mention that our goal is to ship this library with Firefox (and other Mozilla applications as needed). Of course, we would also want it be able to usable in older Firefox releases too. Packaging could be a challenge.