Comments on: I want to help the Fox and the Bird

Question: I want to help the Fox and the Bird

photomusic86 — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:19:17 -0800

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!

By: gen

gen — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:01:21 -0800

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.

By: gen

gen — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:14:30 -0800

I'll add more links as I find them: Firefox Extension Development Tutorial :: Overview

By: gen

gen — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:22:07 -0800

Extensions - MDC. This page has a lot what you'll want to read up on.

By: jacalata

jacalata — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:47:36 -0800

Here is an old but (to me) clear tutorial that starts from scratch.

By: hungrysquirrels

hungrysquirrels — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:19:14 -0800

For Firefox, you could also consider writing scripts for greasemonkey.

By: philomathoholic

philomathoholic — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 13:24:43 -0800

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.