Closed Bug 663148 Opened 13 years ago Closed 13 years ago

See if there's a way to make developing pagemods faster.

Categories

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P1)

enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WONTFIX
Future

People

(Reporter: KWierso, Assigned: dcm)

References

()

Details

For the case where a developer is just using the SDK to write glorified Greasemonkey-type scripts in a page-mod, it'd be nice if there was a way to pick up changes to the script more quickly.

The workflow for writing a Greasemonkey script is something like:
1. Write script.
2. Refresh page to test it.
3. Make changes to script.
4. Refresh page to pick up the changes and test it.


To do the same thing in the SDK with page-mods, it's more like this:
1. Write script.
2. Do cfx run.
3. Wait for Firefox to start up.
4. Go to the page you're testing the script on, test it.
5. Make changes to the script.
6. Go to #2.

It's even worse with the Addons Builder site, since it takes > 10 seconds to use the "test" button each time, although you don't have the app startup time since it's already running.

Fastest thing at the moment that I can think of for this would be to write the script, then do cfx xpi and install that XPI into Firefox. Once you do that, you can go into the Firefox profile's extensions folder and manually edit the contentScriptFile, disable and reenable the extension in Firefox, which picks up the changes.

Any ideas?
`cfx develop` and `cfx run --use-server` get rid of the "wait for Firefox to start up" and "go to the page you're testing" steps, but since the command line is still involved and you have to `cfx run` every time you make a change, it's not quite as easy as your Greasemonkey workflow.

As a development convenience, if the add-on detects it's being run via cfx (as opposed to having been packaged and installed), maybe it could just re-read its content script files whenever a page to which those scripts should apply loads.
OS: Windows 7 → All
Hardware: x86 → All
Assignee: nobody → dcm
Priority: -- → P1
Target Milestone: --- → Future
Adding a link to the new Feature page for this.
Marking anything that potentially looks like a feature request as "enhancement", sorry for the bugspam. :)
Severity: normal → enhancement
We're using the feature page for work on this at this point.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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