Mozilla

Global extensions are extensions that are not installed into a profile. Therefore, the extensions is always available, even in a new profile. Yes, I am talking about extensions, not plugins. Plugins can also be global, there are a few ways to achieve this on the various platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).

XMLHttpRequests (XHR) are used for lots of things these days. When running a background XHR, however, you might experience some common issues like authentication or bad SSL certificate dialogs popping up. Another problem was starting an XHR, then closing the window - the XHR is closed. To help get around these inconveniences, Manish Singh (of Flock) adding support for a background mode (bug 383430). The details:

If you have an extension that uses mozIJSSubScriptLoader (a mouthful, I know) then you should be aware of a recent change (bug 418356). The mozIJSSubScriptLoader interface can be used from JS to load and run JavaScript code from the given URL at run-time. Previously, the URL could be chrome:, file:, data: or resource:, but due to a security fix, the URL is now limited to chrome: only.

For any extension developers out there using FUEL, I checked in a small, but breaking change (bug 421235). FUEL’s bookmark wrappers only supported bookmark items found on the bookmark menu, which was the only bookmark root available at the time. Things have changed and now bookmark roots exist for menu items, toolbar items, tags and unfiled items.

Prism 0.9 has finally been released. Getting platform specific features to work on 3 platforms really is harder than it looks. A big thank you to Matt Gertner (plasticmillion) and Fredrik Larsson (nossralf) for all the work they did on this release.

Good news for developers who are building applications on the Mozilla platform, XULRunner in particular. The wheels are in motion to start creating XULRunner builds (runtime and SDK) that coincide with major Firefox milestones. I encourage interested developers to watch the bug to see how the discussion and plan evolves.

As part of our drive to get as many add-ons updated to work in Firefox 3 as possible, AMO has a new T-Shirt promotion. Get your extension or theme updated to at least Firefox 3.0b3 and you can claim a t-shirt. AMO editors can also claim a t-shirt (lucky dogs). Sign into AMO and go to the developer tools panel to see the “T-Shirt Request” link. Sign up by March 18th to be able to get your t-shirt.