Extensions

It was recently brought to our attention that a change to the context menu handling code has broken some extensions that built on the context menu. Davide Ficano found one of his extensions was broken when we replaced a property on the gContextMenu object, a helper object used to manage the context menu. The change was made in bug 449522 to accommodate new video element support.

We have added more information to the 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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.