On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:05:24 -0500, Houghton,Andrew <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This is interesting and gave me an idea for a project I have been working on.  Can anyone on the list point me to some Mozilla FireFox information for how to construct what the UI calls "sidebars", e.g., View->Sidebar.  It's not the same as a search plug-ins, but I'm looking for information of Sidebars and I also wouldn't mind some pointers to creating search plug-ins.
>

Andy,
  There's a good example of a working sidebar here:

http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=732

  Download the source code:
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/extfirefox/Document_Map_0.4.xpi

The XPI file is just a ZIP file with a special install.rdf file inside of it.
You'll then find a .jar inside that, and it's also just a ZIP file
(again, with special layouts inside).

Having extracted all the files, you'll see that the sidebar is defined
using XUL.  The contents of the sidebar are created using Javascript,
XPCOM, and events.

Developing a FF extension is not trivial.
There's a tutorial here:
http://roachfiend.com/archives/category/tutorials/

And http://xulplanet.com/ will be your friend.

I know this isn't wonderfully helpful, I'm just getting started with
this stuff myself.

  -Jeremy