Developping a Firefox extension

Admit that you have always wanted to know how to develop a Firefox extension but never had the time to learn. Here I will walk you through and at the end of the article we will have created a fully functional Firefox extension!

Our objective

We will create a Firefox extension to find all links in the current web page, highlight those which have a target attribute and alert you how many links it found. The good part is that once you have done this, you have both an understanding of Firefox extension development as well as a blueprint for any extension you would want to develop in the future.

What you need – setting up the developing environment

First, let’s start with setting up your development environment. You need Firefox (duh) and basically whatever code editor you prefer. Then, there are some recommended things to do to prepare Firefox:
Create a different development profile

The first step is to create a different profile in Firefox, since you will do some settings and changes that you probably don’t want for your regular profile. In my case, I’ve created a new development profile named “dev”. The steps to do this are:
Profile manager on Windows

Open the Windows Start menu and choose the Run option (on Vista, it might not be there – just press Windows key + R in that case). In the run dialog, write firefox -P and press enter/click OK. Choose Create Profile in the dialog and follow the steps.
Profile manager on Mac

Open the Terminal (located under /Applications/Utilities) and type in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager. Choose Create Profile in the dialog and follow the steps.
Profile manager on Linux

Open a terminal, use CD to navigate to your Firefox directory and then enter ./firefox -profilemanager. Choose Create Profile in the dialog and follow the steps.
Configuration settings for Firefox

Open Firefox through the Profile Manager (process described above, or set the development profile as default during extension development). Then enter about:config in the address bar. It will warn you about changing settings, but it’s ok since what you will do is only minor changes for development. You can filter the existing settings, and if any of the below settings don’t exist, you can just create them.
Recommended settings

These are good to enable extension errors in the Firefox Error Console (Tools > Error Console), disable XUL caching and such.

• javascript.options.showInConsole = true
  
• nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache = true
  
• browser.dom.window.dump.enabled = true
  

Optional settings

These aren’t necessary, but they might help you out. Personally, I don’t use these.

• javascript.options.strict = true
  
• extensions.logging.enabled = true
  

Point your Firefox extensions directory to your extension

Instead of constantly preparing and reinstalling your extension, there’s a simple way to add a pointer from your Firefox extensions directory to your code location. To do this, you must first find your profile directory:
Find your profile directory

The profile directory is where you will find all the settings for your Firefox profiles, including extension information.
Find profile directory on Windows

In Windows 2000 and XP, open Explorer and go to C:\Documents and Settings\[your user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and in Vista, go to C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming.
Find profile directory on Mac

Open the Terminal and type in CD ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/profiles/. There you will find your Firefox profiles, and they will be named with letters and numbers, followed by a dot (.) and then your profile name, e.g. 12a3bc4d.dev.
Find profile directory on Linux

Open a terminal and type in CD ~/.mozilla/. In that location, you will find all your Firefox profiles, and they will be named with letters and numbers, followed by a dot (.) and then your profile name, e.g. 12a3bc4d.dev.
Pointing to an extension

In your development profile folder, you will find a folder named extensions. In it, you will have code for all your installed extensions. Instead of placing your code there, you can create a pointer file. Do that by creating a file with a unique name for you (this will have to be the same as you chose for your em:id value in your install.rdf file – more on that below).
In the case of our example, create a file named linktarhetfinder, without any extension, and in it just point it to where you will have your code, e.g. C:\extensions\ (Windows) or ~/Sites/linktargetfinder/ (Mac).
Creating folder structure and files

What is needed to have a good base for your extension development, is to create the structure of the extension code. Start by creating this hierarchy:


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install.rdf

We begin with the intimidating code of install.rdf. This is where you will have all the meta information about your extension, which versions of Firefox it supports and other assorted information. Our install.rdf will look like this:


Scary, right? Well, even if your not used to RDF it’s not that bad at all. Like most code, there’s some mandatory information that you will never need to change, and then some of your own to sprinkle in. The interesting parts for us are:
In the Description node

em:id
This is where you add your unique developer id, of your own choosing. Note that this has to be the same as the pointer file you created above.
em:name
The name of your extension.
em:version
Current version of your extension.
em:type
The type declares that is an extension, as opposed to, for instance, a theme.
em:creator
Well, you!
em:description
Describes your extension functionality. Will be shown in the Tools > Add-ons window.
em:homepageURL
The URL of your extension’s web site.
em:optionsURL
The URL to where you will have your file for editing options/preferences.

In the Description/em:targetApplication node

em:id
This value is the actual id of Firefox. Change this if you want to develop for Thunderbird or something else.
em:minVersion
The minimum version of Firefox required to run the extension. Valid Application Versions.
em:maxVersion
The maximum version of Firefox required to run the extension. Valid Application Versions.

Read about more options in Install Manifests.
chrome.manifest

The chrome of Firefox is everything around the content window. i.e. web browser toolbar, menus, statusbar etc. The next file for our extension, which will probably feel a bit awkward to edit, is the chrome.mainfest file. This one, however, is in conjunction with install.rdf the key to how your extension will be added to Firefox, and how it will work. Our chrome.manifest file looks like this:
So, what are all those options? Let’s go through them:

content linktargetfinder chrome/content/
The path to where your extension content files will be found.
content linktargetfinder chrome/content/ contentaccessible=yes
Same as the above, but when contentaccessible=yes is added, it allows Firefox 3 and later to access the extension’s files and show them in the web browser (like within a web page). Found this excellent help through Web pages accessing chrome:// is forbidden.
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://linktargetfinder/content/browser.xul
The path to which file you will use to override web browser elements, and add items to the toolbar, menu and statusbar.
locale linktargetfinder en-US locale/en-US/
Used for localization of content.
skin linktargetfinder classic/1.0 skin/
Skin reference.
style chrome://global/content/customizeToolbar.xul chrome://linktargetfinder/skin/skin.css
Style overlays for chrome pages.

More information can be found in Chrome Manifest.
chrome folder

Ok, once the mandatory parts are out of the way, now things start to get interesting. This is also when we start to look at XUL, which stands for XML User Interface Language. It is developed by Mozilla to create interfaces in Firefox, Thunderbird etc.

First, within the chrome/content folder, create three files:

* browser.xul
* options.xul
* linkTargetFinder.js

browser.xul

This is the file we will use to override some of the default look of the web browser, i.e. add a button to the toolbar, an item to the Tools menu and a statusbar icon. Let’s look at the complete browser.xul file and then break it down:
First, there some general XML syntax, then you include your CSS code and set a DOCTYPE for localization. It’s followed by the overlay root element with its Ghostbuster-inspired namespace (developers are truly geeks :-) ).

After that you’re free to write whatever XUL you want, and basically it’s like HTML should’ve been. What I mean with that is that it is filled with basic interface options that can’t be found anywhere in HTML. For a complete overview of what you can do, please read the XUL Reference.

In our code here, we start with adding a menu option to the Tools menu in Firefox, and connect it to a keyboard shortcut:

Followed by adding an icon to the Firefox statusbar:
And at the end, we add a button to the Firefox toolbar:
Note that you need to go to View > Toolbars > Customize… to add your button to the visible toolbar.

In the above examples, you might have noticed the &runlinktargetfinder; code. That is used for localizing text, and its translation can be found in the locale folder. More on that later.

Another thing to notice, which can be tricky at first, is that some ids and classes for XUL elements actually have meaning for its display, stemming from core Firefox code. Make sure to read the XUL Reference thoroughly for the elements you’re using.

If you want to use regular HTML elements instead of/together with XUL, you can include the XHTML definition in your root element, and then include any HTML element with the html: prefix. Like this:
options.xul

This file is used for the options/preferences dialog for your extension, and its path is pointed out in the install.rdf file in the Description/em:optionsURL node. The complete options file for our extension looks like this:
Again, some regular XML information and styling of the content. It then uses some XUL to layout the content of the preferences dialog. The interesting part here, though, is connecting the user input to the actual settings for the extension (those settings are to be found in the prefs.js file, mentioned in detail below).
To start with, you create a preferences group in the options.xul file with your desired preferences. Then, give each preference an id and connect it to the extension’s real preferences with the name attribute:
Then you create an element and add a preference attribute to it, pointing to the before-chosen idattribute for the preference in the preferences group. It will then automatically connect its value to that specific preference.
Note that you don’t need to add an OK button for the dialog – for instance, on Macs there won’t be one while it’s automatically added for Windows users. All about system compatibility, my friends.
linkTargetFinder.js

If you’re like me, this is where you will feel at home. Good ol’ JavaScript code. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[url=http://www.robertnyman.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif]
What’s nice here is that you can script any element in the XUL and any element in the HTML content window as well. All you need to access the content window is to precede your document call with the content keyword, like this:
content.document.getElementsByTagName("a"); Here’s the complete code of the linkTargetFinder.js file:
While it’s a fair bit of code, it is also very basic. When the window loads, it runs the init method of the linkTargetFinder object. If the preference autorun is set to true, it calls its run method immediately. Otherwise, it will only be called when the toolbar button, menu item or statusbar icon is clicked. This happens through the oncommand attribute on the elements in the browser.xul file.
The code in the run method is pretty straight-forward. It adds a CSS file from the extensions chrome folder to the current document, finds all links in it, loops through them and checks if they have a target attribute, counts those, highlights them and alerts you with the number of hits.
As you can see, there’s a pointer in the code to something called gBrowser. That is how to get a reference to the current web browser, and you could also use getBrowser() as well. Note that this sort of code is only available from within the XUL context of the web browser. More information and options can be found in Tabbed Browser.
The only unusual part for a JavaScript is the variable prefManager, which connects to Firefox preference manager, and later gets the autorun preference with the help of this code:
locale folder

Used for localization. In our case here, we just have one child folder for en-US content, but it can be easily extended. That folder has a file named translations.dtd, which contains translations for entities used in XUL files. Our file looks like this:

<!ENTITY runlinktargetfinder "Run Link Target Finder">

Remember &runlinktargetfinder; in the browser.xul file? This is where it gets its translation.
skin folder

Now when we have all functionality in place, let’s make things a little more pretty (just a little, ok?). In our skin folder, we have three files: skin.css, status-bar.png and toolbar-large.png. The images are, naturally, used for the toolbar and statusbar respectively.

The CSS in skin.css is used for setting the image for the toolbar, the size and space for the statusbar icon and the highlight look of links with a target attribute. The code looks like this:

Packaging and installing

Firefox extensions are delivered like XPI files, and those are basically just ZIP files with another extension. Therefore, when you’re finished with your extension, all you need to do is ZIP your files together and give it an XPI extension. Note: do not ZIP the containing folder for your extension, just its contents (chrome folder, chrome.manifest and install.rdf files etc).
Once you have your XPI file, you can just drag and drop it into Firefox, and it will automatically install.
Packaging with Windows

Select all the contents of your extension folder, right-click and choose Send To > Compressed (Zipped) Folder. Rename it to .xpi instead of .zip and you’re done!
Packaging with Mac

Open the Terminal, navigate to your extension with the CD command and then type in zip -r LinkTargetFinder.xpi *. Ta daa!
Packaging with Linux

Open a terminal, get to your extension folder, and type in zip -r LinkTargetFinder.xpi * All done!
Distribution of your extension

There are two options of distributing your extension. Either use addons.mozilla or host it yourself. If you do it yourself, you can specify an updateURL in your install.rdf file, but note that since Firefox 3 it has to be a secure location, e.g. through SSL or similar.
Personally, I’d recommend addons.mozilla.org for greater reach, auto-update pushing and statistics. The downside of it, though, is that the review process can take quite some time for your extension to get an approval. Before that it can still be downloaded as an experimental add-on, but people need to have an addons.mozilla account and log in to do so.
Downloads

All the code I’ve created here is available both as a ZIP file of everything, so you can start experimenting, change stuff and see what happens. It is also available as an XPI file, which you can install in your Firefox just to test the functionality (drag and drop it into Firefox).
Happy extension developing!

I hope this has been a good, albeit long, introduction to Firefox extension development and that it has helped you to grasp concepts you hadn’t gotten full control over yet. Good luck, and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions!