Playing with the Firefox Add-on SDK
25 June, 2011 § 2 Comments
Tonight I got my first opportunity to play with the new Add-on SDK for Firefox. I used the Add-on Builder, Mozilla’s browser-based editor, to build the add-on as well as test it.
I’ve been thinking of different ways to improve the viewing experience of HTML5 <video> users. One of the ideas that myself and :dolske were thinking of was to add a full-tab playback of video to the browser. This is sort of a middle-ground between author-determined viewing sizes and full-screen.
Some of the benefits of full-tab playback are: (1) user-customizable sizing of the content, (2) easier for users to move playback from one screen to another, and (3) putting the browser into full-screen mode simulates full-screen playback very closely.
Some of the drawbacks of full-tab playback are: (1) not all of the screen space is used for playback of content, (2) a true full-screen mode will probably switch to use more hardware for the scaling, (3) the controls that are designed for normal playback don’t provide the best user experience at large resolutions.
I spent a couple hours making the add-on, and listed it on addons.mozilla.org (all for free, compared to a one-time $5 fee in the Chrome Web Store).
[Update 12/9/2014: The add-on is no longer available on AMO as the browser now provides native full-screen support for <video> and the add-on got out of date.]
JAWS 
I just think that having extensibility to a product is a great thing! The fact that it is free of charge is even better! I haven’t been able to try it out yet though!
You should try it out the next time you’re thinking of something that you wished you could do in your web browser. With just a little bit of code you can do a lot 🙂