Mozilla

Last week we were talking about the need for [private browsing](http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Private Browsing), or something like it, in Firefox Mobile. Even though you might not share your phone with other people, you might share a tablet - especially the “family tablet”, sitting there on the coffee table. Private browsing is an obtrusive system, at least as implemented in Mozilla, and it’s doubtful we could add it for Firefox Mobile in time for the upcoming release. Also, private browsing doesn’t really satisfy the sharing use case for tablets.

We recently landed some code in Firefox Mobile to better handle restartless (bootstrapped) add-ons. Turns out, Dietrich made a non-Jetpack add-on using the SDK and tried unsuccessfully to install it into Firefox Mobile. In the process of getting everything working, I decided to make a simple restartless add-on we could use as a testcase. It’s a copy of Dietrich’s original add-on, without any SDK usage. I’ve not taken the SDK plunge yet. The experience was interesting, educational and slightly enjoyable. The process of testing the install / uninstall and enable / disable mechanism without a restart left me as giddy as a schoolboy.

Firefox Mobile comes with a handy start page, but it might not be your favorite. If you have your own favorite page, you can set it as the start page. First, navigate to the web page you want to use. Then, go to Preferences, tap the Start page button and pick Use Current Page. That’s it!

In addition to working on Firefox Mobile, I like to tinker around with building add-ons too. Not surprising I guess, since I seem to go on and on about how to build them.

Desktop Firefox added native support for a subset of the window.console API. It’s a subset in that only the following API methods are supported:

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.