Burning Chrome

Editing Firefox extensions with Verbosio?

Well, why not?

I've been thinking for a while that Verbosio could bring a lot to the table if you could use it to work on Firefox extensions. Fundamentally, it would be trivial to add support for that to Verbosio.

Verbosio is a XUL application I'm building for editing XML. That's its fundamental goal. For the 0.1 release, Verbosio's first requirement is the ability to reliably edit Verbosio. That means Verbosio needs to understand XUL, XBL, a little JS and a little CSS, DTD... all things that you need for a Firefox extension editor too.

I really do think I could add support for Firefox extension development in a day. It'd be as simple as creating a single component implementing xeIDocumentPack. That same component would mean support for editing Thunderbird extensions, NVu extensions, Sunbird extensions, Songbird extensions, Flock extensions... you name it, if it's a XUL-based application extension, Verbosio could probably start editing it with that single component.

So I'm thinking I should add a second requirement to Verbosio 0.1: "Verbosio should be able to edit Firefox extensions reliably." With that one requirement met, Verbosio would be significantly more useful to the Mozilla community at large, and it would invite people to look at Verbosio more. That might be enough eyeballs to make my bugs shallow.

UPDATE: Done! Now you can open extensions in Verbosio for editing.

Posted by WeirdAl at May 8, 2007 3:42 PM