What If… It Was Easy To Write Firefox Extensions

Writing extensions is labor intensive. Even as a veteran web developer, I feel trepidation at the thought of diving into the boiler-plate code, wading through the XUL world, and restarting Firefox uncountable times. There are tools out there to mitigate some of these problems—like Ted Mielczarek’s Extension Wizard, and Mark Finkle’s FUEL—but they feel like fresh frosting on a stale, left-out-since-last-Thursday birthday cake.

Developer extroadinare, Atul Varma, said it best: “I hereby classify restarting Firefox during development as a ‘barbaric measure’”. Of course, restarting Firefox to install extensions is like-wise barbaric.

As a simple learn-to-write-extensions project, I decided to make a Gmail notifier. All I want it to do is and notify me—in a humane way—when a new email came in. As I dug into the the extension world, I found myself day-dreaming.

Read the rest of the post for some awesome code, that may or may not work.