Overlays without overlays in restartless add-ons

Perhaps the most common way of making changes to Firefox with an extension has always been using the overlay. For a window’s UI you can make changes to the underlying XUL document, add script elements to be executed in the context of the normal window’s code and add new stylesheets to the window to change how the UI looks.

Restartless add-ons change this around completely, the normal overlay and style-overlay mechanisms just aren’t available to restartless add-ons and this is likely to remain true for a while, these methods don’t clean up after themselves when the add-on is uninstalled.

This can make things hard, particularly for porting older add-ons to become restartless. I was in this situation earlier this weekend. I was working on porting David Ascher‘s WebTabs for Thunderbird to be restartless. I could have just moved all the script code over to bootstrap.js but in many ways it is nice to keep the code that works on the main UI separate to the code that runs for the preferences UI etc. Plus I like to play around with new ways of doing things so I developed a JS module I’m calling the OverlayManager.

The OverlayManager watches for new windows being opened and for every new window it can run JS script and apply CSS stylesheets to the window in a way that is easy to undo if the add-on is disabled at runtime. Although it can’t do any XUL modifications right now (I didn’t need any for this particular extension) it would be pretty easy to extend this to support a minimum about of XUL overlays.

Stylesheets are loaded by adding a HTML style tag to the XUL document, so they can be removed easily when the add-on is disabled. Scripts are handled in a way that may even be better than normal overlays. In the old system extension scripts all run in the same context as the window they overlay giving rise to the possibility of conflicts. Restartless add-ons shouldn’t do this since it makes removing the script code again much more troublesome. The OverlayManager handles it by creating a sandbox to run the script in. The sandbox’s prototype is set to the window the script is being run for meaning the script sees all the functions and objects of the window directly in its own scope but as long as it doesn’t modify any of the objects in the main window’s code all we have to do is throw away the sandbox to get rid of its JS.

There are a few things different of course. The script shouldn’t use load and unload event handlers for the window as it may get loaded well after the window does or unloaded well before. Instead the OverlayManager looks for an OverlayListener object in the script and calls load and unload methods on it, these are called either with the window’s real load and unload events or while the window is open normally. You also can’t reference code in the script from JS string blocks, so if you set onclick="myfunc()" on a XUL element it wouldn’t work because that would run in the main window scope which can’t see the sandbox code at that point. This tends to be pretty simple to get around by using addEventListener for all your events though.

You can see the existing state of the code on github and an example of the structure you’d pass to OverlayManager.addOverlays is in the bootstrap script for the same project. It is appropriately licensed so go nuts!

Update: I changed the stylesheets to use XML processing instructions to be more like they work currently and just for fun I implemented the very basics of document overlaying, almost totally untested though so YMMV.

Mossop Status Update: 2011-10-29

Done:
Implemented a number of performance fixes for mobile (bug 696141 and dependents)
Reviewed more of the default to compatible work
Basic implementation for add-on hotfix (bug 694068)
Landed the final third-party add-…

Done:

  • Implemented a number of performance fixes for mobile (bug 696141 and dependents)
  • Reviewed more of the default to compatible work
  • Basic implementation for add-on hotfix (bug 694068)
  • Landed the final third-party add-on patches on aurora and beta
  • Product planning meeting for Firefoxes 8, 9 and 10

Next:

  • Finish the add-on hotfix work
  • Various HR stuff
  • Start planning Jetpack work week

Mossop Status Update: 2011-10-14

Done:
7.0.1 Post Mortem
Hotfix planning work
Understanding the new mobile architecture
Problems with third party add-ons in Firefox 8
Default to compatible planning
Final draft of Q4 goals

Done:

  • 7.0.1 Post Mortem
  • Hotfix planning work
  • Understanding the new mobile architecture
  • Problems with third party add-ons in Firefox 8
  • Default to compatible planning
  • Final draft of Q4 goals

Next:

  • Update module description for the Jetpack module
  • Fix third-party add-on detection problems

Mossop Status Update: 2011-10-07

Done:
Worked with the team to fix the version number problems with the last repacks
Security reviews for embedded add-on preferences and showing performance information to users
Working on Q4 goals for the team

Done:

  • Worked with the team to fix the version number problems with the last repacks
  • Security reviews for embedded add-on preferences and showing performance information to users
  • Working on Q4 goals for the team

Next:

  • Finalize Q4 goals
  • Update module description for the Jetpack module