Today I wrote my first firefox extension. Nothing fancy, it just enables caret browsing, if you're on a BXE page and disables it again, if you're on another page. No more hitting F7 for doing that. Unfortunately it's not possible to add such a feature with remote scripts, the only way is to do it with a locally installed extension.

Writing the javascript for it was super-easy, but writing the installer for it was more complicated. But I did it, there are a lot of tutorials out there about it (it just looks like, that ā€œtheyā€ change the installation procedure for every dot releaseā€¦)

Here's the xpi and here's the svn repo.

Maybe I will extend that xpi with some additional features for BXE. But the plan is to always make BXE work without having to install an xpi. Otherwise we're in update hell on each and every client, whereas with the current approach we only have to upgrade the server side. OTOH, if we can add some convenience or make BXE faster with a locally

installed extension, it's maybe worth maintaining such a thing, but I still have a lot to learn regarding firefox extensions ;)