http://www.osnews.com/story/18113/Firefox_Add-ons_Coding_in_a_Tunnel Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:29:02 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?249193 http://osnews.com/thread?249193 If you're looking into developing Extensions, you should also download Firefox 3a5/Nightly and check out the FUEL API, an API designed to really simplify some of the horrifc JS needed to very basic things in Firefox. You can see the developing specification here:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/FUEL

I personally tried writing a XUL app once, but the documentation was so uterly lacking, outdated and awful I had to give up. If you want to get into Firefox development, do make sure you've modified your pension scheme and life insurance to account for the several years you will lose from your life trying to get an extension to work. Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250542 http://osnews.com/thread?250542 And it's really a shame too.

FF had the potential to become a real player in the RIA/Desktop application development space, if they managed to clean up some of the docs and stabilize the system (so that the docs remained current), as well as writing some solid JS libraries to wrap up a bulk of the communication to the back end. I don't know why they didn't simply wrap all of back end calls in JS wrapper that were easy to use and work with.

None of the parts are implicitly horrible (well, RDF has few fans, but...). And the concept is quite sound -- solid scripting language on top of a solid core of infrastructure. And they the bits that most folks want for desktop/RIA/ and/or client-server applications.

And what they didn't have could have been written reasonably efficient for each application.

But putting it all together and find out which end is up is just a nightmare, and the entire platform has struggled because of it.

Now the Web in general has pretty much obsoleted much of what XUL was trying to achieve in more practical measures as far as desktop-esque applications go. Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (whartung) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250570 http://osnews.com/thread?250570 As much as I love the idea of platform-independent web-as-platform applications, all the current methods seem too convoluted. Couldn't the author have written a Java applet that does the same thing in 1/10th the time?

And the Javascript/HTML/CSS/Webkit/??? web-app mess seems to be what Apple has in mind for IPhone apps too.

Do-able, but needlessly difficult. Tue, 26 Jun 2007 05:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dogen) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250588 http://osnews.com/thread?250588 I suggest author to try creating UserJS for Opera browser with almost same functionality and feel the difference - UserJS are way easier! Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Auxx) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250689 http://osnews.com/thread?250689 That's interesting; I've always wondered if Firefox extensions were really meant to be cross-platform. Extensions like IE Tab just don't make sense to me. Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (i3X171UM) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250717 http://osnews.com/thread?250717 UserJS came to my mind as well.

Has anyone done an in-depth comparison of capabilities between extensions in Firefox & UserJS in Opera? Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KLU9) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250766 http://osnews.com/thread?250766 C is a "procedural" programming language rather than a "functional" programming language, emphasizing imperative programming style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

Great article though. Thx. Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tbostick78) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250797 http://osnews.com/thread?250797 That depends on what you're doing.

I read the first few paragraphs here, and the author could have saved himself much trouble by writing a user script -- everything he needed is possible, and most features would be cross-compatible with Opera and Greasemonkey. Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Spellcheck) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?250957 http://osnews.com/thread?250957 1. You can actually use a dump() command to output to the JavaScript console. But setting up Firefox appropriately requires a bit of work.

2. I gave up on any documentation. Some of the plugins are well coded and can be used for reference. The alternative is to grep the .js files of firefox.

3. Be extremely careful when you access the XPCOM interface directly. Unlike in the other code, you have to do some cleanup to prevent memory leaks.

4. I think jedit is very useful. Among other things, it allows you to save text files in many codings, including UTF8. Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jtinz) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?251251 http://osnews.com/thread?251251 When I started the project, I did not considered Java at all : the documentation was not suggesting it.

Even today, I am reluctant to jump into the Java pool : I use three stand-alone applications on my PC, and I do not like the graphics, nor the responsiveness of the graphical interface. Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Weekedit) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?251253 http://osnews.com/thread?251253 Since my time is not infinitely stretchable, I do not expect to use UserJS. Thanks for the suggestion. Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Weekedit) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?251254 http://osnews.com/thread?251254 Thanks for the suggestions and the warning. Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Weekedit) Comments