Getting Started With FireFox Extensions

Now two of my extensions are also available in FireFox – JIRA Issue Opener and URL With Parameter Opener.

Making extensions for FireFox is harder than making them for Chrome. Documentation and tutorials are tricky and the structure of files is more complicated. So writing hello-world extension for FF took me a long time.

But there is one thing, that is more convenient in FF than in Chrome – using properties/preferences/options. In Chrome you should create your own HTML page for that (in FF you can just list properties and they will appear in the standard addon's settings window). And for getting options in Chrome you should use asynchronous functions (which makes you to write ugly code) – in FF options are basically stored in array and it's really easy to get and set them.

I am not sure that I will convert my other extensions into FF (I made these two only because I personally know people who want to use them in FF), but it's really interesting to understand the difference between two browsers. I'd say, if you have free time converting extensions into FF (or vice versa) – it will be quite good time spending. And by "converting" I mean writing it from scratch – you know the functionality, you have some ready JavaScript functions (not all of them you can use), but you need to write whole thing again.