It was fascinating to watch the unveiling of Firefox 3 last week. I'm pleased that, in some small way, my contributions helped to bring this browser out the door.
First 24 hours: 8.3 million downloads, 69 downloads/second, 20 Gb/s Peak Transfer
While I generally focus on issues tangential to JavaScript code, at Mozilla - like testing, performance analysis, specifications, standards, bug hunting, speaking, demos, and blogging - some of my code is live within the browser, and that makes me quite happy.
One of my first tasks at Mozilla was to, with Mark Finkle, develop a JavaScript API for performing common interactions typically desired by extension developers, called: FUEL. This is a pure-JavaScript implementation that sits as a proxy inbetween the developer and the various, traditional, XPCOM-style ways of performing actions.
If you're interested in learning more about FUEL I've collected a number of links and examples:
The Development of FUEL
FUEL was created over the course of a couple months, in early 2007, by Mark Finkle and I. Mark had much-better knowledge of Mozilla's APIs and I had good knowledge of JavaScript and API design - the match worked out nicely. I've written a coupleblog posts on FUEL and sohasMark.
You can also see the features and code that went into FUEL 0.1 and FUEL 0.2 in Bugzilla.
FUEL, Today
Today FUEL lives in Firefox 3 (meaning that you can use it to develop Firefox extensions) and is part of the core Mozilla platform (meaning that portions of the API will be available in any Mozilla-based application that is built). For example you can even use a FUEL-like API in Thunderbird (called 'STEEL'). Here are some of the best resources for getting started with FUEL in Firefox 3:
STEEL - Example - If you're interested in extending Thunderbird Bryan Clark provides a good example.
Here are some of my favorite example of FUEL in action. It was very important to me that the most-common actions take no more than a single line of code to perform - with even complex actions keeping nice and trim.
Open, and activate, a new tab pointing to Google.com
Development is still going strong on FUEL. There's a Google Summer of Code student working on extending the API and porting it to more parts of the platform (along with backwards support for Firefox 2!). We'll probably end up seeing this in Firefox 3.1 (the next version of Firefox, due out later this year).
If you have any questions concerning how to use FUEL, or to develop Firefox extensions in general, your best bet would probably be to join the #extdev IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. Lots of knowledgeable people hang out there and will be more-than-capable of answering any questions that you might have.
Once again, I'm terribly excited by the final release of Firefox 3 - here's hoping to many more excellent releases to come!
Fuel 0.1 focused on building a solid foundation for further development; laying a good application and events layer, and building out Preference management. Much of our original plan was scaled back due to the nature of how JavaScript APIs need to be written using XPCOM and IDLs. In a nutshell: Dynamically-generated properties are out, as are optional arguments, and arguments that contains non-primitive objects (arrays, objects, regexps, etc.).
The plan for Fuel 0.2 is pretty well defined at this point. We're on track to have it land in Firefox 3.0a5.
Specifically, Fuel 0.2 is going to be dealing with two things: Browser tabs and Bookmarks. We have a fairly-complete version of the Fuel 0.2 API up, this will be on top of the existing Fuel 0.1 API.
If you're curious what this new code is going to look like, here's some examples from our current plan:
NOTE All of the following is subject to change - please view the final plan and API before attempting to use.
If you're interested in tracking our progress on Fuel 0.2, feel free to CC yourself on the tracking ticket for it. If all goes well, this should be in your hands by the time the Firefox 3.0 betas are rolling out. I'm really excited to see some new applications come out that are built on this code.
Bookmarklets:
In the presentation, I refer to a bookmarklet that you can use to introduce jQuery into a web page. Drag these bookmarklets to your Bookmark toolbar to use them.
» jQuerify « - Introduce jQuery into any web page.
» Fix Digg « - The final bookmarklet that we made to remove all buried comments from a Digg post.
If you enjoyed this screencast, don't forget to Digg it up!
Update: If you wish to use Greasemonkey instead of a bookmarklet, then by all means, please do so. You can use the ability to quickly analyze and inspect a page that Firebug and jQuery affords you, using the results to build a Greasemonkey script, instead of a simple bookmarklet. I only really intended this to be a quick introduction to the subject, so please feel free to explore it more!
More Tips: Here are some more jQuery selectors that you can use on a Digg Post:
$("li.c-bury > div").remove(); - Remove all buried comments, but none of the direct replies.
$("div.c-body").show(); - Show all comments, even ones that've been buried.
If you haven't been keeping up on the recent security concerns with Greasemonkey - now's a good time to jump in. I had no idea that the problems where 'that bad' until today. I assumed that it was only possible to do something malicious within a user script, not outside of it (due to bad scoping issues). At least, until, this post caught my eye.
Uninstall Greasemonkey altogether. At this point, I don't trust having it on my computer at all. I would think that whoever is in charge of addons.mozilla.org should immediately remove the Greasemonkey XPI and post a large warning in its place advising people to uninstall it. --Mark
Backtracking through the entire security thread brings up quite a few serious problems. Currently, it's possible to do the following things:
Do not fear! - Headway is already being made. The main concern is that it's possible to access all of the above data outside of a user script's scope. Once this is resolved (and the afformentioned hack may just do that) then Greasemonkey will be back on the fast-track.
