Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

When creating a Firefox extension, I normally writes some code for an extension, create a XPI file, installs it in Firefox, restarts Firefox, test the extension, and then repeat the process. It’s like an edit-compile-debug development cycle except there’s extra overhead in creating the XPI and installing it. The 2 second delay in installing an extension can be annoying if you’re writing an extension.

Fortunately, you can cut out a couple steps in the process by creating a symlink from your profile’s chrome dir to your actual code. For example, if I’m working in ~/myextension/, I can create a symlink from ~/.mozilla/firefox/hash.profilename/extensions/{[extension hash]}/chrome → ~/myextension/chrome. Now I can edit the code and see the changes simply by restarting Firefox.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? There are a couple good tutorials about how to create Firefox extensions.