Video Tutorial – Extensions Bootcamp: Zero to “Hello World” in 45 Minutes

Mozilla’s Myk Melez created a great video introduction to add-on development for Mozilla’s Design Challenge Spring 09. If you’ve be looking for a video walk-through, Myk just served it up for you.

Grok extensions, set up your development environment, and make your first one. We’ll explain how extensions integrate into Firefox and what they can do, show you how to set up an environment to ease their development, and walk you through the making of a simple “Hello World!” extension. Bring your laptop and prepare to follow along. By the end of this session, you’ll be an extension developer.


Extension Bootcamp (Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Spring 09) from Mozilla Labs – Concept Series on Vimeo.

Now combine the video with Robert Nyman’s step-by-step add-on tutorial and the newly released Firefox Add-ons Developer Guide and you’ll be well on your way to honing your add-on development skills.

2 comments on “Video Tutorial – Extensions Bootcamp: Zero to “Hello World” in 45 Minutes”

  1. Namke von Federlein wrote on

    Awesome work!

    A year ago, I got my hands on ‘Programming Firefox’ (O’Reilly by Feldt) and built the infrastructure for my add-on but I just didn’t have the time to puzzle out a) setting up a development environment and b) how to test an the app and the installation of the app safely. And the stuff at the developer web site (until this video) was too slow and not at all reassuring.

    Your video is all that a web developer needs to get going and deliver the goods. XUL is simple (and annoying), CSS, Javascript (video tutorials by Crockford at YUI Theater are really good), DOM, XHTML – I know all of that stuff.

    Now, I can finally get busy and deliver a cute little add-on.

    I really hope that the Firefox team will develop lots of short videos (1 to 5 minutes each) both as a) a step-by-step tutorial and b) by feature. If you want to win the browser race – in my opinion – videos are the KO criteria over the next few years.

    The average person doesn’t need more features. I would suggest that they need at lot more videos explaining all these hundreds of features!

    Also : thanks for including the commands needed for Linux, Mac and Win. I use all three (ie Ubuntu=Linux)! Including the commands for all three was very reassuring.

    Many, many thanks for this excellent overview!

  2. Lisa Duvet wrote on

    I agree with Namke, short videos would be great in assisting newbies like me who just got into creating addons.
    I think no doubt Firefox is winning the browser race because of the abundance of feature rich addons available.