Comments on: How to create Firefox extensions

By: wspruijt

wspruijt — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:37:49 +0000

This tutorial is great! I managed to port the build script to osx. Maybe it’s not the most elegant way, but this works:

#!/bin/sh
EXTNAME=${PWD##*/}
echo $EXTNAME
mkdir build
mkdir build/chrome
cd chrome
7za a -tzip “$EXTNAME.jar” * -r -mx=0
mv “$EXTNAME.jar” ../build/chrome
cd ..
cp install.* build
cd build
7za a -tzip “$EXTNAME.xpi” * -r -mx=9
mv $EXTNAME.xpi ../
cd ..
rm -r build

By: AJ

AJ — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:40:03 +0000

Excellent post. Thanks a ton.

By: saika

saika — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:13:05 +0000

hi, this tutorial is just great!! i am new to this sort of thing and it was very easy for me to understand how to create an extension. but i came up against a problem. when i open the extension.xpi file in firefox it tries installing the extension but thena message pops up saying:
——————————————————
“Incompatible extension”

“Hello, world!” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates
——————————————————
i am using Firefox 3.0.11

what should i do to overcome this? i am building an extension for a project and would really appreciate some help as soon as possible.

thanks :)

By: nikolay

nikolay — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:33:55 +0000

Hello, Thank you for this tutorial, it has helped me in getting started. I am still having a problem trying to get the update to install. I am getting the firefox message after I restart firefox.

‘Firefox could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome Registration. Please contact the author about this problem.’

Has anyone had this problem before?

By: walker6o9

walker6o9 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:03:47 +0000

Hi, I think you’re firefox ext tutorial is awesome, but I’m having some trouble creating the actual .xpi file. When I run buildbat, it doesn’t create an xpi file (or any other file) for me, and I get the following readout error:

C:\>c:\firefoxdev\build.bat thatshot

C:\cd C:\\thatshot

C:\>cd C:\\thatshot\chrome

C:\thatshot\chrome>7z a -tzip thatshot.jar * -r

Scanning

Updating archive thatshot.jar

Compressing content\thatshot\about.xml
Compressing content\thatshot\contents.rdf
Compressing content\thatshot\thatshotOverlay.js
Compressing content\thatshot\thatshotOverlay.xul
Compressing skin\classic\contents.rdf
Compressing skin\classic\gmapit.png
Compressing skin\classic\gmapitb.png
Compressing thatshot.jar

Everything is Ok

C:\thatshot\chrome>cd ..

C:\thatshot>7z a -tzip thatshot.xpi * -ir!*.jr -x!*.zip -x!*.xpi

7-Zip 4.57 Copyright 1999-2007 Igor Pavlov 2007-12-06
Scanning

Creating archive thatshot.xpi

Everything is Ok

C:\thatshot>del C:\thatshot\chrome\thatshot.jar
The network path was not found

By: ralst

ralst — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:46:25 +0000

I found this link for a how-to on disabling the “does not provide secure updates” error:

http://www.ideashower.com/learned/how-to-disable-will-not-be-installed-because-it-does-not-provide-secure-updates-warning-in-firefox-3/

Works a charm, though I did have to change install.rdf’s MaxVersion to 9.9 (as it says to do in the tutorial) in order to get Firefox 3 to load the extension.

Thanks for this great tutorial, Mr. Eric. :-)

By: ruddin_hd

ruddin_hd — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:04:44 +0000

and this is the error i m getting for ur add on
Hello, world!” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

By: ruddin_hd

ruddin_hd — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:02:07 +0000

hey it works but now firefox says tht it cannot find some .rdf file for installation(one file already exists..this is some other file named”install-edd..rdf”)…wht do i do??