FoxieWire.com

1 billion served!

AMO (addons.mozilla.org) recently served up the 1 billionth add-on download. Quite an amazing milestone. Just as amazing, AMO serves up 1.5 million downloads a day! Justin Scott gives more details on the Add-ons Blog.



Fashion Your Firefox

With several thousand add-ons available for Firefox, sometimes it can be hard to find the right one. Mozilla announced Fashion Your Firefox which lets you select a set of add-ons based on how you use the web. Profiles include Shutterbug, News Junkie, Social Butterfly and others. See the Fashion Your Firefox post on the Official Mozilla Blog, the FAQ or David Rolnitzky’s blog post about it.



Add-ons for Fennec

Fennec, the code name for the Firefox mobile browser, has its first add-on. Chris Finke has added Fennec compatibility to his URL Fixer add-on. Then, Chris updated several more of his add-ons. Madhava Enros has screenshots of the URL Fixer running on Fennec.



Mark Finkle also writes that add-ons.mozilla.org has added support for Fennec. This means you can search for add-ons from inside of Fennec and that add-on authors can include compatibility for Fennec when they are uploading and updating add-ons.



First-run behavior for add-ons

Many add-ons like to display some UI to the user after installation. Whether it's a simple welcome message or configuration dialog, the process can result in a bad user experience if not handled well. Justin Scott presents some examples of first-run UIs. Justin goes on to discuss a proposal for how to make the situation better for users and developers.



Add-on ecosystem update: From FF3 to FF3.1

Justin Scott takes a look at the current state of the Add-ons ecosystem and compares it to the state back during the Firefox 3.0 update cycle. He looks at the top ten add-ons from then and now. He has some ideas as to what it takes to get an add-on in the top ten and then, how to keep it there.



Updating add-ons for Firefox 3.1

As the release of Firefox 3.1 gets closer, now is the time for add-on developers to start testing and updating. Justin Scott has the details.



Call For Feedback: Add-on Developers and Firefox 3.1

Paul Rouget has put out a call for add-on developers who are migrating to Firefox 3.1 to report problems they have run into. He’s asking any developers who have issues migrating add-ons to write a comment in the blog post. Also, for people who are filing bugs, Paul has asked developers to put specific keywords in bugs in a post on dev.apps.firefox. Please see his post on the Add-ons Blog and his post in the newsgroup for more information.



New features: CSS Transforms, SVG Effects & MozAfterPaint

Checkout some new functionality and see if you can use it in your add-ons:

• CSS Transforms is a CSS property that accepts a list of transform functions (generic affine linear transforms) and then applies those transforms, in order, to the HTML elements the property is applied to.
• SVG Effects for HTML allows you to use the SVG ‘clip-path‘, ‘mask‘ and ‘filter‘ CSS properties apply to non-SVG elements as well as SVG elements. And we now also have SVG external document references, which makes the SVG effects feature even more powerful.
• MozAfterPaint is an event that is fired anytime the browser needs to repaint sections of the window.

Here's an overview of some other features appearing in Firefox 3.1, including CSS @font-face, geolocation, cross-site XHR /w progress events and video/audio.



Prepare Your Add-on for Private Browsing

Ehsan Akhgari has an excellent technical article written up for add-ons authors who want to integrate with Firefox 3.1’s new private browsing feature. He covers both APIs for detecting changes in the browsing mode and also how private browsing mode affects theme authors.