Firefox web extensions api how to#

– Execute external applications like other browsers, media players, editors, … just as the user wants/needs to – Run small “macro like” Javascript snippets *in chrome context* – Change every preference, if the user wants to I want to add PrefBar to the list of Addons that probably will not work anymore with the new “API”. APIs that are created in a vacuum probably aren’t going to be very useful to people. We’re announcing all of this early so that we can begin to gather feedback. Moving away from XUL will be a long process.

Firefox web extensions api how to#

We can try to deprecate access to the parts of XPCOM used to implement the functionality, but often there won’t be a clear mapping between the old and the new APIs.Īgain, we’re open to ideas about how to do this. Our big fear is that, once we provide a WebExtensions API, there won’t be anything to motivate people to switch over to it. We know that we need to be more proactive about providing APIs that add-ons need. We’re still trying to figure out how to avoid that fate. However, we don’t want this to become another feature like require('chrome') in Jetpack, which is used by virtually every add-on. We want people to be able to experiment with new ideas, and they shouldn’t have to wait for us to design, implement, and finalize a new API.

It’s likely that we’ll still allow some access to XUL in the future. There are also concerns that restricting people to the WebExtensions API will limit innovation: we can make APIs to support the XUL extensions people have already made, but how will we know what other ones we’re missing out on? If you’d like to propose or vote on ideas, please visit to express your opinion. We’re hoping people will have a lot of other ideas for the extensions that they care about. We’re working with Giorgio Maone, the developer of NoScript, to design the APIs he needs to implement NoScript as a WebExtension.Combined with a way to hide the tab strip, we think this could be used to implement an extension like Tree Style Tab. We have a lot of ideas about how to make these sorts of extensions work using better APIs than we have now. One concern people have is that their favorite add-on is no longer going to be supported, especially add-ons for power users. A couple of concerns from that post have come up that I would like to address here. This post is related to “The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons” on the add-ons blog.