I want to help the Fox and the Bird

December 24, 2008 10:19 PM

What do i need to learn to make add-ons of my own for Firefox and/or Songbird?

I'm interested in using my computer skills to improve my favorite open source programs. Unfortunately, I don't know a damn thing about coding, programing, writing lines, terminal, etc. I need to know, where's a good place to start?
I run a Mac OSX 10.5 on an early 2008 MacBook Pro, if you have something system specific. Thanks Hive!

posted by photomusic86 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: You should start out with the Mozilla Developer Center (MDC) wiki.

If you want to make an addon for Firefox or Songbird, you'll need to know HTML, Javascript, CSS, and probably XUL. There's a great XUL Tutuorial at MDC.

By the time you have something ready, Firefox 3.1 may be out, so it may make sense to make sure that you're up to speed on the newest changes and technologies in Firefox 3.1.
posted by gen at 1:01 AM on December 25, 2008

Best answer: I'll add more links as I find them: Firefox Extension Development Tutorial :: Overview
posted by gen at 1:14 AM on December 25, 2008

Best answer: Extensions - MDC. This page has a lot what you'll want to read up on.
posted by gen at 1:22 AM on December 25, 2008

Best answer: Here is an old but (to me) clear tutorial that starts from scratch.
posted by jacalata at 2:47 AM on December 25, 2008

For Firefox, you could also consider writing scripts for greasemonkey.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 5:19 AM on December 25, 2008

In answer to your title question I'd like to point out that those projects also need non-coding help. You could help write or proofread documentation, you could help with translations, you could test new versions (nightly builds?, alphas, betas), and there's some other things I'm probably leaving out.

Plus, building add-ons doesn't contribute directly to either Mozilla project like the things I mentioned above do.
posted by philomathoholic at 1:24 PM on December 25, 2008