OBSOLETE

This module is no longer maintained, and non-functional as of Firefox 38. Use the sdk/ui module instead.

If you are interested in using Chrome extension APIs in Firefox, follow the following bug and its linked bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161828

chrome.browserAction API for Firefox Add-ons

This Jetpack module provides an API which is almost identical to Google Chrome's chrome.browserAction API for creating badges on the toolbar.
Identical in terms of API, identical in terms of appearance!

Usage

If you're familiar with the chrome.browserAction API, using this module is a breeze.
To add a browser action button to your Firefox add-on, copy-paste the browser_action section from your Chrome extension's manifest file to your add-ons background page. After running the following code, a browser action button will appear at the right of the location bar.

var badge = require('browserAction').BrowserAction({
    default_icon: 'images/icon19.png', // optional
    default_title: 'Badge title',      // optional; shown in tooltip
    default_popup: 'popup.html'        // optional
});

• All methods from the chrome.browserAction. methods have been implemented.

Extra features over the chrome.browserAction API.

• The destroy method makes it possible to remove the browser action at any time.
• sendMessage and onMessage have been added to ease the communication with the popup. This API allows for messages with callbacks, and are modelled after the Chrome messaging API.

Missing features

• Tab-specific states are not implemented yet.
• The setIcon method does not take an imageData object (there's no DOM, thus no <canvas> in the background page).

Installation

You can add the module globally (in the packages directory under the SDK root), to make it available to all of your Jetpack projects, or add it to a single project (in the packages directory under your add-on's root).

The official documentation contains a tutorial on installing third-party modules, which suggests to download and extract an archive.
I strongly recommend to use git for this purpose, because it makes package management a lot easier. For example:

# Go to the packages directory of the SDK's root.
cd /opt/addon-sdk/packages
# Clone the repository (creates a directory "browser-action-jplib")
git clone git://github.com/Rob--W/browser-action-jplib.git
# Done! You may want to update and view the documentation...
addon-sdk && cfx sdocs
# Later, when you want to update the package to the latest version...
cd /opt/addon-sdk/packages/browser-action-jplib
git pull

After installing the module, declare the dependency in package.json:

    ...
    "dependencies": ["browser-action"],
    ...

Dependencies

The only external dependency is the toolbarwidget Jetpack module.

Change log

0.2.4

• Remove faviconUrl property because Firefox has deprecated synchronous access to this information (#7).
• Show icon in customization mode (#4).

0.2.2

• New: Automatically shrink button size when the user has set the icon size preference to "small icons". To get this feature, update the toolbarwidget dependency to v1.3 or higher.

0.2.0

• New: The browserAction.onClicked event receives an argument that closely follows the format of Chrome's tab.Tab.
• New: Automatically resize the popup panel when its content changes dynamically.
• New: Unload the popup document when the panel is closed (consistent with Chrome). Previously, the popup was never unloaded after being shown once. If you relied on this incorrect behavior, either update your code, or stick to the previous version.

0.1.4

• Fix: Serialize all resources and included it in the main script (fixes issue #1).

Credits

Created by Rob Wu gwnRob@gmail.com.

Released under a MIT license.