Blair has been integral to the add-ons manager work since Firefox 4 where he wrote all the UI parts of the redesign from scratch. Most recently he knocked it out of the park with the default to compatible feature that is in beta builds now. That was a large hairy project involving multiple teams that Blair basically ran as the lead engineer with no real help from me. Since then he’s proven to be keen on moving the add-ons manager forwards in ways that I wish I still had the time for so I’m sure that I’m leaving the module in safe hands. I still really care about the add-ons manager so I know I’ll continue to be active in reviews, bug reports and discussions (hopefully Blair won’t have to tell me to shut up too many times ) but I look forward to seeing where Blair takes things now.

It took me a little while to remember that I can just use Process Monitor to track down the offending service. Just fire it up, set a filter to only include results to a particular directory (the temp directory in this case) and go create a file there and see what shows up. I was quite surprised to see Crashplan, the backup software I (and probably many people in Mozilla) use. Surprised because Crashplan isn’t set to backup my temp directory and really I shudder to think what the performance cost is of something continually accessing every file that changes in the temp directory.

Turns out you can turn it off though. Hidden in the depths of Crashplan’s advanced backup settings is an option to disable real-time filesystem watching. From what I can see online the downside to this is that files will only be backed up once a day, but that’s a pretty fine tradeoff to  having functioning xpcshell tests for me. There is also an option to put crashplan to sleep for an hour or so, that seems to work too but I don’t know exactly what that does.

It confuses me a little why Crashplan monitors files it never intends to backup (even when the backup server isn’t connected and backups aren’t in progress) and it is quite a lot of file accesses it does too. Seems likely to be a bug to me but at least I can workaround it for now.

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.