Fennec – Let’s Build Some Add-ons

We’re in the last weeks of development before releasing Fennec 1.0 to the world. There has been a lot of great testing and feedback. I think we have a well defined set of things to work on for 1.0 and a good idea of what we want to look at for 1.0+.

However, there is one area I think we haven’t had enough testing and feedback – add-on development in Fennec. Add-on developers are a tricky bunch. They can make you re-think your architecture, brainstorm many new features and find lot’s of hidden bugs. We need more developers working on Fennec add-ons.

We have a small, but growing collection of Fennec-specific add-on developer resources. If you’re interested in building add-ons for Fennec, here’s a list of resources you might find helpful:

The documents have been, and will continue to be updated. Feel free to give feedback on any of the documents. What information or snippets are missing? Use comments, IRC channels (#mobile) or even file some bugs.

Fennec for Maemo and Fennec for Windows Mobile both support add-ons. In fact, the same add-on could be used on both platforms. So get out there are start building.

Oh, one thing I wanted to ask before you go. What features of a mobile device would make building mobile add-ons really kick ass? Support for geo-location? Accessing the camera? Making calls or sending SMS? Leave comments and please go into detail 🙂

10 Replies to “Fennec – Let’s Build Some Add-ons”

  1. “Add-on developers are a tricky bunch”

    Hmmmm… That’s strange, because we think the same thing about core developers. Like deprecation would be nice, for one.

  2. Hi, I’ve a question. Would you recommend developing an extension for Maemo of an app such as Textwit (a Mozilla-based Twitter client) or would it be more suitable to develop it as an stand-alone app based on Fennec code base? I’m a bit worried about the small user base of such top notch devices that support the Maemo platform, so that’s why I ask.

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