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Comment by AC__ | Hacker News Reader

I love Firefox, their addon api is pretty fucking sweet. I've made 2 super simple addons, one to kill a paywall on my local guardian site and a second just last night to easily set lightblue background with black text using a context-menu button, literally took 10 minutes. Can't beat Mozilla documentation.

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That's encouraging news, this is something I've wanted to tinker with. The only time I tried to get into extension making (which, to be fair to them, was 6 or 7 years ago), it seemed a complicated thing with rather poor documentation.

How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?

I don't know much about Jetpack or Elrolysis, next to nothing in fact. Best place to begin would be with the "Getting Started" tutorial https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Ge... Installation instructions here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm#In.... Caveat I haven't used the updated SDK using their jpm tool but my FF 41 is happily running addon packaged with out-of-date SDK. Good news for you is the new work-flow sounds even easier as you no longer need to call bin/activate to use cfx tools. I will eventually update SDK but I was perfectly happy with my old solution: alias ffsdk='cd /home/$USER/addon-sdk-1.17 && source bin/activate && PS1="ffsdk:\W$ "'

Then why are there 20 chrome extensions for HackerNews, but none for FF?

None?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/hacker%20news

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/hackernews

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

Or do you mean "none" is some other way?

a) because there are more conformists in this world than non-conformists(Are we visionaries? Maybe. ;)). b) bunch of people up Google's a$$ thinking they can attract attention to themselves by making an HN Chrome extension. I can offer you lightblue HN http://i.imgur.com/H7Axkk7.png lol

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