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.

URL With Parameter Opener v1.0

Analysts in our project really liked my extension JIRA Issue Opener and ordered me one more similar extension, which have to open URL with one parameter. Basically the same extension, but without adding /browse to URL.

They need it because they often need to open prototype URL with different page ID-s: http://prototype.example.com/project/index.php?id=888, where last number 888 can be changed according to page that you want to open.

So I made new extension URL With Parameter Opener and now I am a little bit confused what should I do with JIRA and Fisheye Commit Graph Openers – seems like I don't need them anymore.