Universal Search desktop experiments in addon format

These steps come from the extension dev page on MDN. Look there for lots more detail.

1. Make some changes to your Firefox profile, or create a separate profile.

• It's nice to create a separate addon profile, but not necessary.
• In either case, there are some prefs used for addon development; you can easily add them by installing the devprefs addon.

1. Create a proxy file to link your local addon code to your addon profile.

• The proxy file is just a file inside your addon profile's extensions directory, where the file name matches the addon's name (in our case, [email protected]), and the file contains the absolute path to the code, with a trailing slash.
• Example:
  • proxy file: /path/to/ff/Profiles/6h6ygzlo.addon-dev/extensions/[email protected]
  • proxy file contents: /Users/jhirsch/codez/github/mozilla-universal-search-addon/src/

1. When you want to hack on the addon, start Firefox from the command line:

• /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -purgecaches -P "addon-dev"
  • -P "addon-dev" specifies which profile to use
  • -purgecaches stops FF from caching files, so you can instantly (?) see changes

1. If you're hacking on the iframe, then configure your profile to use a local copy:

• Set these two prefs in about:config:
• services.universalSearch.frameURL: the complete iframe URL
  • default is 'https://d1fnkpeapwua2i.cloudfront.net/index.html'
• services.universalSearch.baseURL: the iframe's base URL
  • default is 'https://d1fnkpeapwua2i.cloudfront.net'

1. The first time you use a local iframe, you'll probably be serving it from https://localhost:8080/. You will get a security warning, it'll look something like this: To work around this:

• Surf to the iframe URL (the enter key won't work. You will have to click the Go Button, the little right arrow at the edge of the address bar)
• Once you load the page, add a security exception for the self-signed cert provided by the local content server.

1. Restart the browser, and you're in business.

1. Manually bump the version number in src/install.rdf and src/update.rdf.
2. Bump the version number in package.json using npm version patch. This will generate a git tag, too.
3. Zip up a new addon: gulp build.
4. Release the addon to people: scp dist/addon.xpi [email protected]:public_html/universal-search-addon/addon.xpi
5. Release the src/update.rdf file to people: scp src/update.rdf [email protected]:public_html/universal-search-addon/update.rdf
6. Probably email the universal-search list?

Note: By design, this only works on one window at a time.

• Enable & open the Browser Toolkit (see MDN docs, it's easy)
• At the console, type: window.US.popup.isPinned = true
• Next time the popup opens, it'll stay open.
• Set window.US.popup.isPinned to false when you're done - or just close the window.
• Note: the Browser Toolkit slows performance down a lot. Close it if you don't need to actively debug stuff, and the iframe will be much snappier.