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

Danger Will Robinson!

[Elrac]

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.

But... but... isn't it just this extreme flexibility that represents the biggest Achilles heal (sic) of Outlook and IE? Isn't this what Mozilla proudly avoids?

I realize that there are some differences, such as the fact that the red carpet is only rolled out for extensions the user trusts, but... when you advertise Firefox to dummies, your trusting users will BE dummies!

Re:Where's my bittorrent:// ?

[brsmith4]

http://firepuddle.mozdev.org/ might help sometime soon...