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

How to Setup Two GWO MVTs on the Same Page

This is a follow up post to the one I did yesterday, where I explained how to go about running a Google Website Optimizer a/b test and multivariate Test on the same page. I mention this because I intend to skip a lot of the steps I explained in that post already to avoid repeating myself.

The Problem

Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:

  • You have two areas of one page that you want to test different variations of, each of which have separate goals, so you would like to run two separate Multivariate Tests on the same page to track the results separately.
  • You have a site wide element that you would like to test, and a page specific element that you would like to test.

In both of the above cases you will need to setup two multivariate tests on the same page.

The Solution

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How to Setup a GWO MVT Test and A/B Test on the Same Page

The Problem

I was recently asked if it was technically possible to setup a A/B Test and Multivariate Test on the same page with Google Website Optimizer. I had to think about it for a moment, I knew that one could run multiple tests on the same site with GWO already, so I knew the utmx cookie must be able to remember multiple tests. So I thought it must work as long as one is careful about the way that he applies the code to the page, so I let the person know I was pretty sure it would work. Soon after I had whipped up a sample to give it a whirl and it worked perfectly, so I had my proof.

The Solution

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