Extension Hacks Wanted

A large part of my job at Mozilla is trying to make life easier for extension developers. In order to do my best, I need to understand the pains of extension developers. Up to now, I have been writing various types of extensions myself (sidebars, statusbars and components) to try to understand what an extension developer goes through. I even download extensions just to look at the code, trying to find comments like “hack” or “sucks”. But really, that’s not enough. So now I am asking extension developers directly:

What can Mozilla do to make writing extensions easier?

The title of this post mentions hacks, but I am interested in all aspects of extension development:

• Tutorials
• Installation / Updating
• Using frozen XPCOM interfaces/ components/ services
• Intergating into Firefox/ Thunderbird UI code
• Protecting against version to version breakage
• Documented best practices (or lack of)
• Anything else (extension related)

Feel free to leave comments on this post (preferred) or send to mark dot finkle at gmail dot com