Extensions

Using eval() to decode JavaScript you downloaded from a remote website in your extension is just plain wrong. It’s not safe! Don’t do it!

Building things with the Mozilla Platform usually involves dealing with some boilerplate. Extensions have install and chrome manifests and overlays. XULRunner applications have application and chrome manifests and default preferences. XPCOM, even the simpler JavaScript XPCOM, has modules, factories and categories. It’s more than enough to slow developers down, especially new-to-Mozilla developers.

Mozilla just opened the new source repository (mozilla-central) meaning the next release features will start landing. David Baron posted about landing new CSS selectors. Robert O’Callahan posted about some kick-ass SVG-based CSS effects used to style HTML. This totally rocks and will help push SVG into more of a leading role on the Web.

Shaver and I have been talking about getting a decent mechanism for remote debugging a JavaScript session. I have been looking at JSSH. It’s a bit dated, but a great little Firefox/Mozilla extension that adds a huge amount of external flexibility, control and extensibility. The Watir-based web testing system for Firefox (called FireWatir) uses JSSH to control the current Firefox browsing session. The big downside to JSSH is that it has binary components, so you need to build it across platforms and Gecko versions. Yuck!

Samer Ziadeh will be working on a Summer of Code project to enhance FUEL. He is looking at some feature requests found in bugzilla, bug 406974 and bug 409279 specifically. Samer has already done some work with FUEL. The past semester, he ported much of the code to work in Firefox 2. It wasn’t a perfect fit as Firefox 2 is missing some integral new functionality supported in Firefox 3. Without it, backporting to Firefox 2 became difficult.

Extension Developers! Yeah, You!