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Firefox Extension Contest (deadline december 2007) - DC CODING CONTEST TOO

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tinjaw:
I have just spent a few minutes researching what it takes to build a Firefox Extension. In summary, JavaScript and XML knowledge. I suggest you start at the Mozilla Developer Center article Building an Extension.

Oh, almost forgot to mention, if you don't already have it, grab Firebug.

tranglos:
I have just spent a few minutes researching what it takes to build a Firefox Extension. In summary, JavaScript and XML knowledge.
-tinjaw (November 20, 2007, 02:59 PM)
--- End quote ---

JS and XML are the easy part, because they're copiously documented eveywhere. Personally, every time I had an idea for an FF extension I was halted by not knowing where and how to hook up the extension to FF internals. If I want to look at cookies, how do I inject my extension into FF's cookie processing mechanism? If I want to do something every time FF does "Save As", where does that procedure go? If there is a beter way than reading through FF source code, I'd love to know what it is!

An extension I really, really want is one that will let me block cookies by domain. FF can only block adserver1.somesite.com, and then I have to click Deny for adserver2, adserver3 ad nauseam. Some sites seem to have hundreds of subdomains, e.g. intellitxt.com. So I want to be able to block all cookies from *.somesite.com, but allow cookies from goodstuff.somesite.com.

There was/is a neat little program called CookiePal that does exactly this, but I'm running too many "resident" apps already, and would rather see this done directly in the browser.

.marek

Lashiec:
Hmmm, I recall per site preferences ala Opera were being considered for Firefox 3, but I don't know if they made the cut. Beta 1 is out, but I didn't have time to check it.

D'oh! Forget about it, it doesn't have anything to do with what you envision.

tinjaw:
every time I had an idea for an FF extension I was halted by not knowing where and how to hook up the extension to FF internals.
-tranglos (November 20, 2007, 03:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

This is a WAG, but I would imagine you just need to look at the DOM and find the appropriate events to attach to. I'm not sure if in the JavaScript/DOM world they call them 'callbacks' or not, but that would be my guess.

tranglos:
every time I had an idea for an FF extension I was halted by not knowing where and how to hook up the extension to FF internals.
-tranglos (November 20, 2007, 03:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

This is a WAG, but I would imagine you just need to look at the DOM and find the appropriate events to attach to. I'm not sure if in the JavaScript/DOM world they call them 'callbacks' or not, but that would be my guess.
-tinjaw (November 20, 2007, 03:48 PM)
--- End quote ---

I thought so, but then DOM is only a representation of the document. Nothing there lets you control cookies, read/write FF preference settings or access functions such as Save As. There's a Mozilla DOM reference here:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_DOM_Reference
but it doesn't help with what I was (once) trying to do.

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