Restartless

I have talked about how add-ons interact with the new Firefox on Android, but we didn’t have any easily accessible documentation. Now we have some guides and code snippets:

One of the first things I yelled about when we were debating switching to a native Android UI for Firefox was add-on support. Using a XUL-based UI meant add-ons were free. The Mozilla platform has support for add-ons baked right in. Moving to a native UI would surely kill our ability to support add-ons, right? Wrong!

A long time ago, in May 2008, I posted about a remote JS shell add-on I was building. I had been tinkering with a few existing projects (JSSH, SD Connect and MozRepl) but wanted to build something small, lightweight and mainly focused on helping add-on / XUL developers interact with JS running in a separate application. I tried to get the protocol closer to that used by Opera DragonFly and Crossfire, but I never had the time to get it exactly right. When I started work on Firefox Mobile, I used the add-on to interact with Firefox running on a mobile device from my desktop machine. Unfortunately, I never felt the UI and the code were good enough for a public release.

Recently, Google released the beginnings of a cloud-based printing system called - Google Cloud Print. The project is still in Beta, but you can install a recent version of Google Chrome on Windows and attach your local printers into the Cloud Print system (more). Google has added support for Cloud Print to few of their mobile web apps, but has not released a client application API yet. However, they did release a simple webapp demo - and where there is a demo, there are people reverse engineering it.