How to Create a Firefox Plugin (hacker-friendly javascript framework)

just sharing dude. Firefox plugins aren't hard when you know what you're doing or when you use a higher level API like Jetpack and/or Greasemonkey and get your users to install them. But they are still a pain to setup when you have to get so many different files structured perfectly (or the plugin will silently fail). And sometimes you can't ask users to install third party software and higher-level APIs suffer from limitations like an inability to handle file encodings properly.

This is intended for people who would otherwise be dealing with this:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_dev...

It's a package that compiles with a big start here arrow and intelligent defaults for toggle-on behavior and cross-tabbed browsing. As for the time savings? It reduced my own development time for a recent plugin to something on the order of 20 minutes. I'm sharing because it might be useful to someone else, not because I'm building a higher level API for Firefox. I don't have the time or inclination for that. :)

firefox plugins are actually pretty tough to get started with if you are new to them, even for the adept hacker. there's just not that much in the way of introductory documentation out there. and sure all plugins are open source, but it isn't that fun to try and reverse engineer someone's plugin just to figure out how things work.

i really like the looks of this! thanks for posting.

Wow, I'm glad not everyone shares your mindset.

CSS grids aren't that difficult, but I find http://960.gs/ really useful. Having a nice, packaged example of best practices comes in handy.

If this saves me 5 minutes each time I want to create a quick firefox extension, it provides value. Thanks for sharing, trevelyan!

Jetpack is an additional extension install for users.

This framework looks like it builds native extensions without an extension needing to be preinstalled - at least until jetpack is shipped with ff.