Testing a Firefox Extension

If you are starting a new Firefox extension now or might in the future, then here are some tips you should be aware of, and which I want to record for myself.

Setup a New Profile

Firefox saves bookmarks, passwords, user preferences, and extensions in a set of files collected in a folder, which is all called your profile, and this is stored in a different location than the Firefox program files. So the first step I recommend is to setup a new profile for the extension. If you need help with this follow the Firefox support knowledge base article on managing profiles here.

Add a Pointer File

If you are using Firefox 2.0+ (and you should be) then you can create a pointer to the folder where you are developing the extension, and this is the fastest way to develop.

1. Find the profile folder for the profile you just created, and open the "extensions" folder inside.
2. Create a new text file whose name is the extension's id, and whose contents are the location to the extension's source.

For more reading see the Mozilla developer center article on building an extension