Extension Developers - Breaking News

Some extension developers using nightly versions of Firefox 3 may have noticed (as Doron Rosenberg did) that a recent change caused some extensions to break. Bug 414836 changed the ID of the used in browser.xul, the main Firefox window (“navigator-toolbox” was changed to “browser-toolbox”). Doron filed bug 415099 to try to get the initial problem fixed another way. I don’t think that will happen as the other ways which were tried caused Ts regressions.

Doron also posted a workaround that nicely handles the problem: (assuming you are overlaying a vbox into the toolbox)

 
  

  

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You frequently see this approach used in XUL overlays that target Firefox and Thunderbird too.

Ratty (on IRC) also notes that other element IDs have changed too. I am going to get a list of the changes and post them to the MDC article on updating extensions.

Snarky Note: The original bug was a problem in the data persisted in localstore.rdf which would have been much easier to fix if it was localstore.sqlite

Update: Other toolbar related element IDs have been changed as well (in bug 404109) so I thought I’d let you know sooner than later: “nav-bar” -> “navigation-toolbar” “PersonalToolbar” -> “personal-toolbar”