Coding Conventions for Browser Extensions

Douglas Hofstadter’s fabulous book Metamagical Themas includes an entire chapter musing on the “visual textures” of Chopin’s etudes and their relationship to the aesthetic impact of the music. Style matters in software code as well. I am reminded of a profile of Bram Cohen of BitTorrent fame, in which his wife claims that “…the code [...]

WebRunner for Firefox 3.6?

Having discovered that some recent changes to WebRunner had broken compatibility with Firefox 3.6, I had more or less decided simply to discontinue support for older versions of Firefox. Then I stumbled on the fact that nearly 64% of Firefox users still have version 3.6. I thought a bit harder about it, but I’m still [...]

The Future of Firefox Extensions: Make Them More Like Web Apps

A few years ago, having just started work on a very ambitious (and now defunct) Firefox extension, my business partner and I met with some of the Mozilla top brass to pick their brains. One of the most interesting tidbits that we walked away with was the rough estimate that only 5% of Firefox users [...]