Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (“new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator”) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.

The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is looking for help as they work on improving the add-on development experience. “If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox (or other applications), we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read. We’ll summarize the findings in a few weeks.” Add-ons are a vital part of the Firefox ecosystem, so any help you can provide here would be hugely beneficial to the project as a whole — Add-ons Developer Survey.