Last week, I shared my hack for syncing my browsing between my computer and mobile. It’s built around a Firefox extension, so I thought I’d share my notes on how I got it to work.
This post is a complete sample for creating a Firefox extension to add a button to the browser toolbar. When you click on the button, it grabs the URL from the Firefox address bar and does something with it.
I’ve gone through each file you need, explaining what it’s for and giving a sample ready for copy-and-pasting.
In my browser sync hack it sent the URL to my phone, but for this walkthrough I’m going with something simpler: opening the webpage in Internet Explorer. You can replace that bit of script with something more useful 🙂
I’m not an expert at this stuff by any means, and I found a lot of useful code snippets on mozilla.org to get me going. But this seems to work, and as people that I’ve shown my extension to so far seemed surprised at how easy it was, I thought it might be useful to share.
Apart from the Internet Explorer bit itself (which is a little Windows-specific), the rest of this should all work wherever Firefox does.