Firefox extension contest
Nov 08, 2005, 02:40am EST
A contest has recently started to write extensions for Firefox. There are lots of new features in Firefox 1.5 for you to leverage for this contest. Some things I would like to see:
- An updated version of Venkman Javascript Debugger. Bonus points if you’re able to extend it to show information about memory leaks. Maybe something like python’s gc module?
- A quicksilver like interface for searching bookmarks and history (hit ctrl+h and start typing in a transparent overlay). Including thumbnails would be nice. Better yet, come up with an intelligent algorithm to determine what area to take a thumbnail of (whole page or finding a logo on the page).
- The ability to download torrents in the browser. I’m not sure what I think of turning the browser into a server, but a version of opera tried this.
- A XUL unittesting framework. I’m not exactly sure how this would play out (constant browser restarts would be annoying), but you could probably build on top of jsunit.
- Chris mentioned to me that he wanted a drag-and-drop XUL editor.
Hmm, is it obvious I want better development tools? :)
Anyway, if you’re new to extension development, there are lots of tutorials online to help you get started.
Nikolas Coukouma at Nov 08, 2005, 04:06am EST
For the torrent part, see: Firepuddle. It’s a Google Summer of Code project. Sadly, it seems dead now (judging by public CVS).
tony at Nov 08, 2005, 10:43am EST
Ah cool. Yeah, it looks like it’s in a pretty early state.
DC at Nov 08, 2005, 01:15pm EST
I’ve always thought that torrent files really feel like they should be integrated into the browser. It isn’t a file that you can just use on its own like a text word document or quicktime movie. It’s a file that you use to get something that you can use on its own.
I don’t know if the Venkman thing that you mentioned does this, but I would really love to be able to see what weird javascript, etc. is being run on my computer via CSS or AJAX or whatever. I wouldn’t use it very often, but I would feel a little better about life if I could figure out whether some website is trying to run malicious code on my browser. And because the web was all about seeing something cool on a website and being able to look and see what they did so you could do it too - and I liked that.
tony at Nov 09, 2005, 03:42am EST
By “see what weird javascript, etc. is being run”, do you mean just view the source? I’m not exactly sure what “seeing” means. What does it mean to see what java/c++/whatever is being run?
Venkman is a debugger like what you find in Visual Studio, eclipse, IntelliJ, etc (e.g., you can set break points and step through code). This would let you see the source code, but it could always be obfuscated which is more common with javascript because it can reduce the download size.
Samantha at Dec 07, 2005, 10:36am EST
Hey…could you update the LJ Friends Checker for 1.5? I’ve used it for months and now I’m literally forgetting to check my flist because it’s not working. I’d update it myself if I knew how. :-\ Thanks.