Category: Extensions

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Ready for a Challenge?

Mozdev and Mozilla Europe have teamed up to create a Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Add-ons Challenge. The goal is to create or port add-ons to Fennec. You only need to propose a concept for now, but you’ll need to get the add-on ready for the upcoming Mozilla/Maemo developer weekend in Copenhagen on May 30-31.

See Brian King’s post for more details.

I am interested to see innovative ideas for using the limited UI in Fennec, add-ons that focus on mobile-specific functionality, and code that exposes more of the Maemo device functionality to Mozilla (yes, XPCOM is likely involved).

I also wouldn’t mind some applets (either as add-ons or XUL apps) running on Maemo. Think about mobile-specific Chatzilla or FireFTP for example. By mobile-specific, I mean dramatically different UIs, not just porting the existing desktop UI. If many little focused applets work for the iPhone, why not for other mobile platforms? And with XUL/JS, it’s pretty easy to build them. Anyone got a XUL-based Twitter app? 🙂

As always, we love to hear feedback from anyone building add-ons or apps on our mobile stack. Post comments, file bug reports, visit the IRC channels (#mobile & #extdev).

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Fennec & Gestures

Felipe Gomes has been busy. We talked on IRC a short time ago about adding a gesture engine to Fennec. He made a video of the current version. The results are very cool. His work is being tracked in bug 476425. The engine is currently packaged as an extension, so you can play with it yourself. Just pull from Felipe’s repository and put the code inside your extensions folder in your profile.

Go digg it!

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FOSDEM 2009 Wrap-up

FOSDEM 2009 is over. Once again, there was a lot of great stuff happening. I managed to leave the Mozilla Room once or twice to see other sessions. The Mozilla Room sessions were very good and not just because I was in two of them. There were so many people trying to get into the Mozilla Room, we had to stop people from coming in.

I posted the presentations of my Fennec and Embedding sessions. The Fennec session has a companion wiki article as well.

Paul Rouget moderated a spirited discussion on creating XUL communities. The group created a lot of good feedback for Mozilla and for themselves. I really hope we make some progress on the action items.

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DOM Inspector for Fennec

DOM Inspector is a great tool for debugging XUL, HTML and CSS. DOM Inspector 2.0.3 now supports Fennec (1.0a1 – current). To install in Fennec:

  • Go to the Add-ons Manager “Get Add-ons” pane.
  • Type “dom inspector” into the search box.
  • Press the “Add to Fennec” button.

There is currently no visible UI (menu or toolbar) to launch DOM Inspector, but you can use CTRL+SHIFT+I to open the inspector window. Using DOM Inspector should make porting add-ons to Fennec a little easier. Tested on Fennec desktop and n810.

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Fennec – The Inside Story

No, I’m not dishing dirt on Stuart. I started to put together some Fennec front-end documentation. Fennec is similar to Firefox, but very different at the same time. Some background information and discussion of the internals is probably a good thing.

I also pulled in some performance related guidelines, most of which I discussed in this post. The document will become the core of my FOSDEM Fennec talk. If you’re thinking of attending that talk, read the document first and come prepared with questions.

I want to add sections on JavaScript APIs and events available in Fennec, as well as some of the process flow. Add-on developers, in particular, should have a solid understanding of the internals. It will make porting your code easier.

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Add-on-Con, Open Houses and Mobile

Next week I’ll be in Mountain View, CA. Mozilla Mobile is having a face-to-face work week, gearing up for Fennec Alpha 2. As a remote employee, I enjoy getting together with the rest of the team.

You’ll also find me at Add-on-Con on Dec 11th presenting a session on Add-ons and Mashups. I’ll show some existing add-ons, walk through some code, and generally discuss the advantages of using add-ons to create mashups.

Mozilla is having a small informal Open House the previous night (Dec 10th) at the Mozilla Offices. Be sure to stop by and get your fill of information on Firefox 3.1 & Add-ons.

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Fennec – Here Comes AMO

Last night, support for Fennec on AMO was pushed live. A big thank you to Mike Morgan and crew for making this happen. There are no recommended Fennec add-ons yet, so you need to search for them. Here are some results, based on the two add-ons I know support Fennec and are on AMO:

Extending this mobile browser is now fully operational!

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EU MozCamp 2008 & Me

I am headed to Barcelona to take part in Mozilla Europe’s MozCamp 2008 conference. I’ll be presenting sessions on XULRunner, Fennec Add-ons & Embedding Gecko. If you’re interested in any of these sessions and have topics you’d like to see covered, let me know. Commenting here or adding items to the wiki pages are goods ways to do that.

I also plan to hang around the Prism session, presented by Matt Gertner. Prism has some cool features brewing. I hope we get a new release (with samples) out soon.

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Fennec Alpha1 & Add-ons

One of the reasons we released Fennec A1 with desktop versions was to allow add-on developers to start hacking on Fennec add-ons. As long as the add-on contains no binary compiled code, it should run on any platform – including mobile devices. Developers can build and debug Fennec add-ons using the desktop builds, without needing an actual device.

As I previously posted, making a Fennec add-on is no different than making an add-on for any Mozilla-based application, such as Firefox, Thunderbird or Songbird. Fennec is a different application – add-ons for Firefox will not Just Work in Fennec. I started documenting the process of building Fennec add-ons. I plan to add some use cases there too.

Fennec supports installing add-ons from websites (remember to use the right MIME type – application/x-xpinstall). Once an extension is ready for testing, the developer can post the XPI somewhere. The add-on can then be installed to Fennec on devices or Fennec on desktops.

Very soon, we will support Fennec add-ons on AMO (addons.mozilla.org)

Update: If you want to debug your code using the error console, try using the command line flag like this:
fennec -jsconsole