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:
- Architecture Overview
- Extensions Basics – Look here first
- Code Snippets – Doing things in Fennec might be different than Firefox
- Best Practices for Building Extensions
- Creating an Options UI for an Extension
- Tips for Creating a Robust UI – XUL and CSS to the rescue
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 🙂
Is the Options infrastructure described at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Extensions/Options implemented in the Fennec emulator (1.0b1)?
If so, are there any example add-ons which use these s elements?
Let me try again: “… which use these >setting<s elements”
The infrastructure is _not_ implemented in any release yet. It is on trunk only. You can use a nightly Linux desktop build to test.
Get me a device, I’ll write an extension 🙂
I may write a Fennec add-on to let user control Songbird or play music from the library.
Mike, the new Nokia N900 is coming in October. Before that, you can test with desktop builds!
“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.
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.