iosart blog

If you’re not familiar with ColorZilla, it’s a Firefox extension I wrote a while back to help me with my web design and development tasks. Over the years, it became quite popular with web developers and designers. Anyway, over the course of this past year I added a few new features to ColorZilla (mainly because […]

As you might know, Firefox 3 will be released very soon, so I needed to go over my extensions, make sure they are compatible and make the necessary adjustments here and there. I started with PlainOldFavorites and FirefoxView, here are the new versions: PlainOldFavorites 1.0.1 Compatible with Firefox 3 Catalan, Czech, Danish, Greek, Portuguese translations […]

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m now using Google Reader in WebRunner as my main RSS aggregator. A few days ago, Google released Google Gears – it’s a browser add-on that allows various Web apps to work offline by providing them with ways to store and retrieve information locally. As one of its […]

I’m an RSS junkie. I go over nearly 200 feeds every day – news, industry updates, my friends’ blogs, flickr photos and so on. That’s why my RSS reader has become the second most important application for me, after the browser. The problem I used SharpReader and RSS Bandit and encountered very similar problem with […]

As you might know, FoxyTunes is featured on the prestigious “Firefox recommended add-ons” list, along with 25 other excellent extensions such as Greasemonkey, Performancing, StumbleUpon and FireFTP. The list is displayed in a random order, which gives each and every extension on the list an equal chance of being discovered by the users. One thing […]

Yesterday I received my Author’s copy of the new “Hacking Firefox” book published by Wiley. The book was written by Mel Reyes and several contributing writers. It has tons of useful information, hacks, tips and tricks on just about every aspect of Firefox. I wrote the chapters on Mozilla Programming and specifically on Firefox Extension […]

Several interesting issues I’ve encountered while developing the PlainOldFavorties extension: Mozilla cannot correctly handle filenames that contain Unicode characters (on Windows). See bug 162361 for more details. Unicode issues seem to haunt many products and frameworks, and as I found out, Mozilla is no exception. If this is issue is important to you (and if […]

I’ve created a new extension that integrates the Internet Explorer and Windows ‘Favorites’ with Firefox. Its name is ‘PlainOldFavorites’. The home page for the new extension contains more information. I’ll quote the extension home page to explain what it does and why I created it: Firefox has a great Bookmarks system. It has many wonderful […]

Right now there is no support in the Firefox Extension Manager for running a script when the extension is uninstalled. Such script might be useful if your extension needs to perform some clean up, like removing some temporary files or registry entries. I’ve managed to find a work around for this: Install an unload event […]

Update: Bug 253742 is very close to being fixed, so the workarounds in this post will no longer be needed. Thanks to the Mozilla developers for making the platform even better. Every Firefox extension consists of several parts. It often has a UI part, typically written in XUL and some scripts typically written in Javascript. […]

Update: This issue (bug 252543) has been solved in Mozilla, so the workaround is no longer needed. I have written a Firefox extension which uses an XPCOM component. When the extension is installed and the user will try to install a newer version of the extension, the installation fails. The reason for the failure is […]