Tag Archives: add-ons

Mozilla Dev Network Hackday – NYC – March 2012

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So.. Mozilla had its first ever Hackday in New York City last Saturday and I had the opportunity of attending it. There were some really good talks which ended with some hacking post lunch. It was an awesome experience getting to meet all the wonderful folks who participated in the hackday and to see their great hacks, and the excellent job by the Mozilla team in running the show.

Some of the talks that were presented were (slides linked):

At the end of the day, I presented an extension that would calculate the Readability scores of text that was selected within the browser. This “Text Readability Scorer” Firefox extension was something that I already had in mind, but which was languishing and waiting to be completed using the latest Addons SDK. The hacking started post lunch and I managed to do complete something that could be presented at the end of the day. While this add-on didnt use any of the cool HTML5(and friends) stuff that was presented earlier that day, I still managed to get a working Extension for Firefox 11 and presented it in the end.

A more complete write-up of the event can be read at the hacks.mozilla.org site, with the extension I presented getting a mention under the “Here come the hacks” section.

Below are a few screenshots of the Readability extension in action, The source code can be found on GitHub.

Add-ons screen showing the Readability Extension

Add-ons screen showing the Readability Extension

 

Context-sensitive Right-Click menu showing the "Calculate Readability" menu option

Context-sensitive Right-Click menu showing the "Calculate Readability" menu option

 

Final result screen shown in a "Panel" with the Readability results.

Final result screen shown in a "Panel" with the Readability results.

There is still a lot of work that has to be done, such as calculating the number of syllables more accurately etc. Lets see where this goes, I might be submitting it to the Add-ons’ site once it has some more complete functionality. Thank you for reading! :)

Mozilla Firefox: Is there a difference between Add-ons, Extensions and Plugins?

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I was reading up some documentation about writing my own Mozilla Firefox extension when my close partner in crime, Vignesh, IMed me. When he found out what I was doing, he asked me what exactly the difference was between a Firefox Add-on, extension and a plugin.

After thinking about it for a while and coming across the same in the extension development documentation – I decided to write about it here..

In short, all extensions are also Add-ons, But “Add-ons” is an umbrella term for extensions, themes, plugins and language-packs.

Extensions

Extensions enable the user to alter the existing functionality of the browser or to add completely new functionality. Eg: Firebug, YSlow, etc.

Plugins

Plugins are libraries which are used by the browser to display/render stuff that it cannot do natively, Eg: Flash, Java, PDF etc.

Themes

Themes allow you to change the look and feel of the browser, allowing you to customize it to your liking. There are hundreds of free themes for download.

Now, If you were wondering what the difference was between a Firefox theme and a Persona, Personas are a special kind of theme which lets you change the look and feel without altering other components of the UI such as the navigations buttons, etc. It also lets you try and install new “personas” without having to restart your browser to apply the changes.

If you had this question lingering in your head, hope you found it useful!