Firefox plugins allow you to add new features to your favourite browser. Here you will find two example (very simple) plugins we developed long time ago.

PingPong

This plugin was developed more as a Proof Of Concept, and it was used later as a learning tool for us to teach XUL programming.
Despite its simplicity, it is a complete plugin that not only demonstrates how to build and deploy a working plugin, but it is itself a funny game, a tribute to the very first arcade game by Atari.
We never thought of doing it public, but when we decided this would not harm us to share it, surprisingly it reached more than 6000 downloads during the first week after publishing, in January 2006.

You can still find it in the Mozilla addons page, and it was included in some game collections too:

Lola Editor

We developed this plugin to help us cleaning and standarizing the CSS and HTML markup of a big portal we was building for a customer, whose layout was broken due to a terribly designed legacy CSS. By that time we was working with the wonderful tools "Web developer" and "FireBug", but none of them gave us the simple feature we needed: just to visually locate a block with the mouse, click to open, change the markup and see the results immediatelly.
Again, we never thought of sharing it, but after we finished the project and we saw how much it had been speeded up by this tool, we decided this could be of great help to other developers, so we shared it as it was. It lacked a lot of superb features, but after all we was giving out for free! And in case anyone needed to extend it or use it as a starting point for its own plugin, we shared with a LGPL licence which grants anyone access the source code.

You can still find it in the Mozilla addons page, and it was included in some game collections too:

Getting the source code of the plugings

I mentioned before that these two plugins were "shared" under a LGPL license, so you can both freely use the plugin and freely access the source code, to take a look and maybe learn something, to use it as starting point for a new project or to modify to meet your own needs.

To access the source code you only need to download the plugin from Mozilla addons page, and save the ".xpi" file to your local file system instead of installing it (the default action for your firefox browser). So, if you download with firefox, don't forget to click right button, then "save as..."

The downloaded file, with "xpi" extendion, is just a zip file (in fact we use java jar tool to create them) containing all the source code and resources (like css, images, etc). You can find information on how to develop in the Documentacion center. The skills you need to modify or develop your own plugin are XUL, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, DOM.

From Stream18 we encourage to use our shared code and we hope you can find it useful. In case you need us to do some improvement on these plugins, or you need a new plugin to be developed, don't hesitate to contact us:
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