firefox Archives

Firefox Addon: Add options menu to addon icon

Especially during development it’s annoying to reach the option page of a Firefox addon:

Hamburger
Addons and Themes
…
Options

There should be a faster way. At least for your own Add-ons you can quite easily add an “Options” menu item to the browser action:

browser.contextMenus.create({
    title: 'Options',
    contexts: ['browser_action'],
    onclick: () => {
      browser.runtime.openOptionsPage();
    },
  });

Additionally to have to add a new permission to the manifest.json file:

 "permissions": ["contextMenus"],

That was easy!

Hide the password hiding stars

As far as I can remember web browsers replace the characters of a password field with stars (did Mosaic already do this?) but this feature is not always helpful. Fortunately you can change this! Continue reading Hide the password hiding stars

My favorite Greasemonkey-Script

Greasemonkey is a fine Firefox-Addon that allows you to execute some Javascript on the page to change the content or do other stuff to enhance the experience.
My all-time favorite is Jasper’s Google Reader subscribe. What does it do?
Every blog, almost every news site, and many other web sites provide RSS feeds. They are a handy thing but some sites make it hard to find the corresponding link or don’t display it at all. The only chance to find the link would be to browse the source code of the page. Scanning the code while you’re in front of a computer? Ridiculous! Let’s use the machine and that’s what this script does.
It looks for links containing the strings “rss”, “atom”, or “rdf” and displays a small icon at the top right of your browser:

If you hover the mouse cursor over the icon all found feeds will be displayed:

As you see not only the main feed is found but also the comment feed and possible others. With this script installed you can simply click on this icon and subscribe to feeds without frantically scanning the page.

Download “Jasper’s Google Reader subscribe”