How to extend Firebug's inspector feature? - firefox-addon

I have found out that Firebug for Firefox is an open source project and we can extend it.
By searching for documentaion about Firebug extension development I found the following website:
http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/extending-firebug/
Unfortunately its petty old and doesn't have information for current versions (i.e. 2.0.x) of Firebug.
My goal is to extend Firebug's inspector feature.
So can anyone please tell where I can find an up-to-date guide for Firebug extension development?

The existing Firebug 2 is broken once e10s is enabled by default in Firefox. That's why Firebug 3 (aka Firebug.next) was recreated from scratch based on the built-in devtools.
Therefore it is recommended to base new developer extensions on the built-in devtools instead of the old Firebug 2 source.
A guide describing how to do that is available at the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). And there are also example extensions in the Firebug repository on GitHub as well as a template extension created by one of the devtools developers.

Related

List & Label web report designer cross browser compatibility

I'm planning to use list & label as a reporting tool for my MVC Web Application, I downloaded the trial version and the sample code was really helpful.
I'm almost settled on using this as my app's reporting tool but I'm thinking twice on their web app report designer tool, because I needed to install the chrome extension before I can use it.
I'm using version LL v.20
So my questions are:
Is the chrome extension really needed for the designer to work? I'm thinking that if my app goes live, will I require my clients to install this plugin first?
Will the designer have issues on other browser? So far I haven't seen extensions/plugins for IE (only Fireforx, Safari, Opera, Chrome).
PS. If all else fail, can you suggest an alternative for this? The reporting tool that I need is web-based and allows end-users to edit the reports. Thanks!
1) Yes, you need to install the plugin on the client side.
2) For IE, there's a Designer ActiveX. Simply open your existing app in IE, you should be offered to install the OCX right away.
As to your general concerns:
We plan to replace the plugins with a client-side application that can be one-time installed with a couple of clicks in LL21. The reasoning is the step-by-step deprecation of plugins by most browser vendors. Changing between the plugins and the new designer app will be quite easy. The new designer will also support previewing at design time. Depending on when you plan to ship your application it may well be worth the wait till October.
I have tried List and Label Web Designer and found that installing additional application for all users is not a good idea. Will look for another solutions, may be FastReport.Net. That online designer is realy online and can work not only on Windows.

Official Dart Polymer samples not displaying in Chrome (work in IE)

https://www.dartlang.org/samples/
I have the latest version of Chrome Version 34.0.1847.131 m
None of the polymer samples work in the browser, I just get a blank box where the sample should display.
I tried on IE and Firefox, 4 of 6 samples work fine (none work on Chrome).
Defining a custom element - broken
Searchable List
Get input from a form
TodoMVC
Polymer and internationalization - broken
A task management tool
Is there something I need to do to get them working?
Background - I want to develop the equivalent of a desktop application that I can run in the browser as a learning experience and try to use a widget UI library.
There's nothing you should need to do for these to work. They all work for me in latest (stock) stable Chrome without any adjustments (36.0.1985.143 (Official Build 287914) m).
I would check the console for errors (press F12 to open the dev tools), and also try in Incognito Mode (which should disable most/all extensions) to see if there are any clues.

Can Delphi VCL project be compiled to a browser plugin?

I have a Delphi VCL application which I'm using to show some pictures and I would like to know if there is any possibility to transform it into a browser plugin (like firefox, google chrome etc ) in order to load it remotely, like a java applet.
for all of them the answer is NO. even for IE it is sometimes difficult...VCL applications means win32/64 development in general, browsers are more 'related' to web development. you can reconsider and try to resolve this by using an already existing platform which can be easily integrated into web browsers like Shockwave (yeah, I don't like to give links to wikipedia...) or another similar tool.
You can use VirtualUI from CybeleSoft to run your Windows app in a browser. You still need to set up your backend server with database etc, and make sure that some operations are blocked - you don't want someone to browse through your server files ;-)
There are options:
ActiveX plugin (you might need to enable ActiveX support in browser or use a special plugin to enable it)
NPAPI plugin (will be deprecated in Chrome in late 2014). See question: How to embed Delphi VCL form into HTML page using NPAPI?
Take a look at the samples on Raudus. It might be what you are looking for. It will be interesting for you to read this about VCL compatible component set for the web.

Adding add-on bar to a custom XULRunner application

On MDN, the phrase "Add-on Manager-enabled XUL application" is introduced.
By dragging a XPI file containing an add-on and dropping it onto a FireFox window, the addon's widgets will be installed in FireFox's add-on bar.
I can also use Firefox to run a XUL application by specifying the commandline option "-app application.ini".
Since MDN makes me think that the two are not mutually exclusive, I'm looking for a simple 4 step process where steps 1 and 2 are create a XUL application and XPI independently, step 3 describes how to change either the XUL application or the XPI in preparation for step 4, and step 4 is final integration.
I'll start you off with steps 1 and 2, and then suggest some things that need to be done in steps 3 or 4.
Step 1: Build the XPI by following the tutorial at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.3/dev-guide/addon-development/implementing-simple-addon.html
Step 2: Build the XUL application by following the tutorial at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Getting_started_with_XULRunner
Now for Steps 3 and 4. They should include modifying the application.ini built in step 2 by adding the code:
[XRE]
EnableExtensionManager=1
They should also include adding lines to prefs.js to support the extension manager. And they may require adding addon bar window element to XUL by adding code similar to:
<toolbarpalette id="BrowserToolbarPalette">
<toolbarbutton
id="xfox-statusbarpanel" class="toolbarbutton-1 chromeclass-toolbar-additional"
label="&name;"
tooltiptext="&name;"
oncommand="toggleSidebar('xfox-sidebar');"
context="xfox-contextmenu">
</toolbarbutton>
</toolbarpalette>
I've succeeded in making the "Add-on Manager-enabled XUL application" (aka <TestApp>) accept the XPI (aka <wikipanel>) and attempt to install it, but it fails with the error message: "<wikipanel> could not be installed because it is not compatible with <TestApp version 1.0>"
[edit] I editted INSTALL.RDF (for my XPI) and added the following:
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>testapp#sample.xul</em:id>
<em:minVers‌​ion>0.0</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>9.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targe‌​tApplication>.
The extension now installs, but I am getting the following error in jsconsole:
Error: The widget module currently supports only Firefox. In the future it will support other applications. Please see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560716 for more information.
You are mixing things up here. The -app command line flag is there to run XULRunner applications, not browser extensions. As to Add-on SDK, it doesn't have XUL support, only HTML. There is a fork of the Add-on SDK with XUL support but it looks somewhat outdated and I'm not sure whether it is capable of creating standalone windows (is that what you are asking about?).
There are of course classic extensions. They allow you to do anything including creating new XUL windows or using the add-on bar. But they are quite a bit more complicated to write.
I've found the answer but it is a bit of a hack and requires removing the following lines of code from the addon-kit javascript source:
if (!require("api-utils/xul-app").is("Firefox")) {
throw new Error([
"The widget module currently supports only Firefox. In the future ",
"it will support other applications. Please see ",
"https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560716 for more information."
].join(""));
}
Since the above code is specifically designed to prevent using the addon kit in anything other than bonafide Firefox, this avenue is not worth pursuing further. However, if there is a way to build a xul-app in such a way that it conforms to Firefox, then I will revisit the issue.
Firefox is chrome://browser/content/browser.xul after all.

Creating menus in browser menubar from Add-on SDK extension

I am building a simple Firefox extension using the Add-on SDK 1.0.
Scouring the docs and googling a lot, I couldn't find a way to create a simple menu under the browser's tools menu. Add-on SDK has a context-menu module, which (obviously) only handles the page context menus, which is not what I'm after. Is it that Add-on SDK does not have a module for this yet? If so, I believe I have access to all the firefox's XPCOM API in the Add-on SDK extension, but I can't figure out how to use this and create a simple menu entry under the tools menu.
Any pointers on how I might do this?
(BTW, not sure about the tags of this question, please correct if you feel so)
I wrote a module called menuitems which can be used to easily add a single menuitem to any of the normal menu bar items. It's on github here.
I haven't had the time to write docs yet, but you can find an example here, and the example is on AMO here.
I'll blog about it one of these days..

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