Oxymoronical

One of the problems with writing a restartless add-on is that you have to be careful about undoing anything your add-on does when it is told to shutdown.

Keeping the software you use up to date is a crucial part of keeping yourself safe while browsing online.

Our success in switching to the new rapid release cycle for Firefox has stirred up lots of excitement in the community and I wouldn’t be surprised if that intensifies when we ship the next update to Firefox in 8 weeks time.

A funny thing happened last weekend.

One of the nice features that we added to the add-ons manager in Firefox 4 was support for custom add-on types that could be treated the same way as the built-in types, even showing up in the same UI if you did a little work.

A long long time ago (I can still remember…) we changed the preference you use to disable compatibility checking for extensions.

It’s been about a year since I last went through this.

We were amusing ourselves on IRC yesterday by showing each other the first patches we ever submitted to Mozilla and I suddenly noticed that mine was exactly 6 years ago from today.

I had some free time yesterday so I thought I’d try to dabble in building Fennec with some debugging to figure out why it looks like ass on my phone.

Firefox 4 is just around the corner and it’s great to look back over just how far the Add-ons Manager has come since Firefox 3.6.

Lots of people seem to be playing with the new support for restartless extensions (also known as bootstrapped extensions) coming in Firefox 4.

As I blogged yesterday, today Ripley got a CT scan and biopsy of the mass that is growing in her left shoulder.

Well that’s certainly a nicer way of saying that you’re trying to work out just how to decide how much money and trauma it is worth putting your cat through to keep her alive.

There are many blog posts on the subject of how to best set up your camera to shoot fireworks but I was so surprised at just how well it worked out for me that I thought I’d add mine to the pile.

To be clear I don’t blame BA for having to cancel flights into Heathrow when the airport cannot run at full capacity.

As I mentioned before I was part of a presentation at Add-on-Con this year.

Next week is Add-on-Con 2010 and if you do any work in the add-ons space then you’re probably going to want to take a look at what is going on and hopefully sign up to attend.

We’re past API freeze so any API changes should be getting announced and communicated.

I had a plan to go back to doing some more traditional Fractal work this weekend, unfortunately the best tools out there (UltraFractal is a fine example) tend to be on Windows and all my machines are Macs right now.

After my last post about how I no longer have the time to maintain Nightly Tester Tools I am happy to say that someone has stepped forward to take over development and maintenance.

I’ve finally been able to make some early alpha builds of PreFox, which is clearly a rather unoriginal name for Firefox running on the Palm Pre, available for testing.

You might have heard of this web-browser.

I love fractals and I think Jonathan Coulton is great, so I think that this is really really awesome.

One of the goals of the new add-ons manager API was to create something that was itself extensible.

Add-ons have really been an integral part of Firefox ever since before its first release.

With all of the work that has gone into the new add-ons manager for Firefox 4 I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look back at the history of this part of Firefox and a quick look at what the future may hold.

This isn’t normally something I’d syndicate to planet, but it has a certain relevance to Firefox so I thought I’d make an exception here.

Are you an extension or application developer?

I’ve spent some time this week transferring all the API documentation for the new add-ons manager from the Mozilla wiki to the Mozilla Developer Network.

For some time now Firefox has supported a way of installing extensions that involves simply copying the extension’s XPI file into one of the extension install locations.

Many of you nightly testers may have noticed that Nightly Tester Tools’ compatibility override feature doesn’t work with the new add-ons manager and may be wondering when I’m planning to issue an update to fix that.

A little sort of coincidental performance regression forced us to back out the new add-ons manager last week.

Finally, after far too much time, the new add-ons manager is about to land in trunk nightlies.

I’ve never been terribly impressed with my current digital camera.

Since I posted last week about how I was experimenting with running Firefox on my Palm Pre a number of tech news sites, large and small, picked it up and posted their own take on it.

One of the first things I did when I moved to the U.S. was to get myself a smartphone, and that phone was the Palm Pre.

I blogged a short time ago about how we’re adding support for a new form of add-on to Firefox that can install and uninstall without needing to restart the application.

You may have read some reports about how we’re re-implementing the bulk of the extension manager in Firefox.

Look Ma, no restart!

The big project that I have been working on for quite some time now is a complete change to the architecture of the add-ons manager backend.

It struck me the other day just how much of a pain debugging asynchronous xpcshell tests is.

If you are an extension developer and include executable files in your XPI package (binary or shell scripts) then you may be seeing problems in Firefox 3.6.

It’s been quite some time since I last worked on my prototype XPCOM component/interface viewer and I have to face facts, it’s likely to be quite some time till I do again.

Ever since Firefox 2 we have vaguely supported a form of extension dependency.

Back in the mists of time I wrote some code to make nightly testers’ lives easier by giving them a simple preference to flip if they wanted to be able to install and use incompatible extensions.

As part of the ongoing work to bring basic support for lightweight themes (based on the ideas from the Personas extension) into Firefox 3.6 I’ve today landed the main UI parts that allow users to see and select between lightweight themes they have used re…

I have been remiss in not posting a status update about this in two weeks, but that is mostly because we have unfortunately had to slow down work on this feature.

This week has been the Firefox work week where almost all of the team, including me, made our way to Mountain View.

This is a weekly status update on the feature to notify users about add-ons that third-party installers have added to Firefox.

I’ve just landed code that allows extensions to include their icon in the add-ons manager view even when disabled.