I've always wondered how they work, turns out it's more simple than I thought.
The extensions are built similar to how a web page is built. I'll try to explain each part and how they fit together as I go through them.
Enjoy.
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So first things first, I wanted to have a menu that you can make selections on that pops up when you click on the extension in the toolbar on the top right of the browser.
These are built using HTML and you can style with CSS and add scripts, so I made some checkboxes in HTML and built a script to save the state of those checkboxes to some browser storage and retrieve them each time a page is refreshed.
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So now that the popup menu was done I got to work on a separate script that would watch the values that are changed by the popup menu for any changes, and then apply those changes to the page.
Then I needed something to tie it all together, enter the manifest file. This file lets you outline what permissions your extension will need, and what files it will use.
It was all done, now to get it on the Firefox add-ons site you have to zip it all up and wait for it to be approved...
...and it was approved, you can see it for yourself here. It's only really an experiment but maybe you will find some use for it, maybe it will make you a multi-millionaire.
This worked out pretty well and was much more simple than I first guessed it would be.
Can you think of any extensions that you would find useful?
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy your day.
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