Developing Firefox Extensions with GNU/Linux

QT writes "Ars Technica has a lengthy but useful introduction to developing Firefox extensions with GNU/Linux. This guide comes hot on the heels of the RC for Beta 1 of Firefox. The article is a little more thorough than necessary, but I can't complain about anything that spurs Firefox development." From the article: "What can you do with a Firefox Extension? Firefox extensions can modify the Firefox user interface. This includes adding buttons to tool bars and menus; changing fonts, colors, and icons; capturing events in the client interface like page loads and clicks; and modifying web pages after the browser loads them and before the user sees them. All of this functionality comes with the aspect-oriented facility of overlays. Extensions also have as much access to the file system as the user running Firefox. Extensions can add protocol handlers, hooking actions to URLs like icq://, aim://, or stantz://. Extensions have UniversalXPConnect privileges, allowing them to harness any XPCOM component. Firefox comes with a rich library of XPCOM components that permit your extension to drive very low-level functionality like sockets from Javascript. You can also augment the XPCOM library with Firefox extensions by adding Javascript, linkable libraries, or XPIDL."

Comments

Re:Where's my bittorrent:// ?

[drsquare]

Well, Opera usually seems to be a few years ahead of Firefox when it comes to functionality, speed and ease of use, so we should see integrated bittorrent support for Firefox somewhere around 2009.

Talk about appropriate...

[null etc.]

The article is a little more thorough than necessary

...followed by a 146-word "excerpt" from the article.

Re:But what if...

[protocol420]

good luck finding a compiler built into the kernel