Where can I learn how to develop addons for Palemoon? Topic is solved

[Diviy Slanagladov]

(Sorry for any mistakes. English is not my native language)

I've never wrote a single add-on for Firefox or Palemoon. But now I want learn how to do it.
I'm looking for relevant essential resources - manuals, tutorials for beginners, basics about manually watching source of addon and auditing third-party addons for security issues.

I'm not interested in writing add-ons for Firefox, my target platform would be Palemoon-only.

I was looking around these places:
https://palemoon.org
https://addons.palemoon.org/

And I can't find sufficient documentation to get started.

I tried to search this forum with request 'develop addon' 'develop extension' but failed. Maybe you can recommend some better keywords or I missed something?

I visited tutorials sections and read but I failed to find any relevant headers.

I visited viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16785 but it's... not enough for me.

At Mozilla's MDN I found these series:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... Extensions
Are those relevant to Palemoon?

I also stumbled on info about at least three different technologies used by Mozilla for writing extensions and I'm a bit confused what is what (1. XUL, 2. bootstrap, 3. WebExtentions, 4.SDK). Is there any reasonable overview to explain - at least cursory - what is what and what is compatible with Palemoon?

[lyceus]

My advice is that you choose a plugin that is shared in both Add-on sites (Pale Moon and Firefox) pick one version and study the changes.

As for your comments:

You should see XUL. SDK is partially supported but somewhat deprecated. Web Extensions not support is one the of the reasons of why Pale Moon exists. And maybe you need to contact... Matt A. Tobin^TM aka New Tobin Paradigm.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

My full name is properly written as "Matt A. Tobin", as you WELL know.

Anyway, as far as extentions go.. Pale Moon does not and will not support WebExtensions but Basilisk sort of does but I would not recommend using the technology for it.

Jetpack aka the Add-ons SDK is a thing in Pale Moon but as mentioned it is mainly as such for legacy reasons for Firefox extension compatibility and only after a fasion. It is NOT recommended for use for new Pale Moon extensions. However, prior restrictions on it will be relaxed in the next milestone verson of Pale Moon (28) later this year.

No your best bet is to stick with good old fasioned Toolkit aka XUL Overlay style extensions which work and speak the same languages any normal XUL application like Pale Moon does. Though, Bootstrap aka Restartless which is a hack on top of that is fine too. Though I personally wouldn't recommend bootstrap, it is perfectly valid.

Hope this answers your question at least on a basic level.

Admin Edited for remove personal vendettas.

[Isengrim]

I visited viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16785 but it's... not enough for me.

That post just describes how to target Pale Moon in your extension. Platform targeting is done in the Install manifest file of your extension.

At Mozilla's MDN I found these series:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... Extensions
Are those relevant to Palemoon?

The XUL School tutorial you linked is relevant to Pale Moon extensions, if slightly outdated. That was what I used to start writing extensions.

Unfortunately, as you have no doubt discovered, Add-on documentation is pretty scattered all over the place. Here are a few more links that you might find useful:

Add-ons documentation archive
Archived documentation on extensions. Some of this is outdated or not applicable to Pale Moon, but this is probably still the best documentation out there.

XUL Tutorial
Basic information on how to use XUL.

XUL Element Reference
Guide to XUL elements and controls.

XPCOM Interface Reference
Most of the interfaces here beginning with "nsI" are APIs you can use in an extension's scripting to interface with browser components and functionality.

Finally, there are plenty of extensions that have already been written that you can use for reference - anything from the Pale Moon add-ons site will work, as will any add-on from AMO that doesn't use the SDK or WebExtensions. Simply extract the XPI file like you would a ZIP file and use your favorite text editor to look at any of the files within.

HTH.

[Diviy Slanagladov]

Thank you, especially Matt A. Tobin and Isengrim. I think those answers resolved most of my initial shock and confusion.
Aw, it's a pitty that documentation is scattered and not explicitly adapted and proof-read for current version of Palemoon, but oh well. You can't always have it all, ^_^
If Isengrim says that those tutorials are relevant, I'll try them out. And now I know how to browse XPI - I think it's good to know too.

I'm happy that now I have enough basis to explore on my own. I'll focus on learning XUL.