Extensions

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.

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:

Okay, so it’s only two add-ons, but it’s a start. First, MR Tech’s Local Install from Mel Reyes was updated with support for Fennec. Then, URL Fixer from Chris Finke got support for Fennec.

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.

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 mentioned in the Fennec M7 release notes, the Add-ons Manager has been hooked up. Therefore, I decided to post some example add-ons for Fennec. Fennec is a XULRunner application and gives extension developers access to the same underlying XPCOM system that is used in Firefox. The process of building extensions is the same as for any other Mozilla based application.

Firefox 3 had some big changes (and little changes) that caused some grief for extension developers wanting to update add-ons to the newest version. There were some deep architectural changes (Places bookmarking API), numerous security changes (same-origin on file:// and restricting chrome:// from content), and large UI/Theme changes (URLbar, XP/Vista/Linux/Mac themes). Needless to say, getting lots of new greatness in Firefox 3 (XULRunner 1.9) came at a high maintenance/refactor cost to extension developers.