Firefox Toolbar Tutorial

This tutorial explains how to create a toolbar extension for the Firefox web browser (specifically for version 1.5 and later). It provides an overview of how extensions are developed, the tools required to create an extension, and details on how toolbars are created. Please note that this tutorial is lengthy; I recommend spending time with it over the course of a few days (it makes for a good weekend read).

Extension development isn’t difficult, although some basic programming knowledge is required. There are three basic areas I recommend that you should be somewhat familiar with: XML, JavaScript, and CSS. None of these topics are difficult to pick up, and there are a number of excellent tutorials on each around the web (I will highlight some as we continue).

Firefox 1.5 greatly improved the extension development experience (i.e. creating an extension is now much easier than in previous Firefox releases). This tutorial takes advantage of these improvements; where necessary, I will indicate how things have changed. Many of these new techniques are not backwards compatible with Firefox 1.0.x.