Extensions

I was part of this year’s Add-on Con event, presenting some information on building add-ons for Firefox Mobile. Learning how to work in multiple processes can be tricky at first, but once you get used to working with messages, it gets easier. The information was also relevant for Firefox Desktop, since multiple processes will show up there in a future release. Felipe Gomes is working very hard on getting that project jump started.

I’ll be taking part in the Training Day portion of Add-on Con this year. Firefox Mobile has made the jump to a multi-process architecture and many aspects of add-on development have changed. Sure, this could be a little scary. Yes, you will need to learn some new tricks. Of course, we’ll be here to help you. My session at Add-on Con will be all about building add-ons that work in a multi-process architecture.

in case you haven’t heard yet, Firefox for mobile (Fennec) is bumping it’s version numbering to more closely match desktop releases of Firefox. This means “Firefox 2.0b1 for Android & Maemo” is becoming “Firefox 4.0b1 for Android & Maemo” and will be released as “Firefox 4 for Android and Nokia N900”. We are aligning mobile Firefox and desktop Firefox since the web rendering engines used in both browsers are the same. Treating them as the same version seemed like the right thing to do.

In previous versions of Firefox Mobile, you could check for and install updates for your add-ons by pressing the “Update” button in the Add-ons Manager. This meant that you could check whenever and as often as you wanted, but, if you didn’t really want to manage these things manually, you could find yourself without the latest versions.

With Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo ready to go and the final release not far away, now is an excellent time for add-on developers to update their add-ons. Obviously, Mozilla wants as many add-ons as possible to be compatible with the latest version of Firefox Mobile.

Fennec 1.1 now supports context menus. Using a long tap (aka tap-n-hold), or right-click on desktop versions, you can get a context menu to appear.

There has been a lot of discussion about the future of the Mozilla add-on infrastructure. I think it’s clear now that Mozilla is not removing the classic add-on mechanism. In fact, Fabrice Desré found a nice bit of news on an upcoming feature (via comments on Atul’s post):