Firefox Mobile – A Few Add-ons

In addition to working on Firefox Mobile, I like to tinker around with building add-ons too. Not surprising I guess, since I seem to go on and on about how to build them.

Anyway, I have a few add-ons that you might find useful – either installed in Firefox Mobile or as examples you can rip apart and use to build your own add-ons.

Mobile Tools

Mobile Tools is a collection of a few utilities that might be useful when debugging mobile webpages. You’ll find commands for viewing page source and basic page info. Both open in new tabs. Page source shows the web page’s raw HTML content. You can zoom and pan through the source just like any other web page. Page info shows some simple bits of information about the web page:

Mobile Tools also supports window.console a little better than the built-in native support, including:

• String formatting in logging methods (%s, %d, %i, %f)
• dir and dirxml
• Simplified trace
• group and groupEnd
• time and timeEnd

Start Page Plus

The built-in start page, Firefox Start, is pretty, loads fast and has some nice features. We can always add more! Start Page Plus adds a few sections to the standard Firefox Start page:

• Favorites: A list of bookmarks you want displayed on the start page. Just tag a bookmark with “start” and it appears on the start page.
• Local Search: Quickly find various types of places near you with a simple tap. Includes food, hotels, gas, movie theaters and your own location – shown on Google Maps. This feature does use the built-in geolocation feature.
• Local Twitter: Shows tweets happening near you. You don’t need to be logged into Twitter. The stream is based on your location.

Use the add-on options to show and hide sections as well as move them around the page. You can also set the zone used to pull in tweets from Twitter.