I am aware of the page and have written an Extension in the past. I am unclear about the following things
a) Is Jetpack the way to go going forward? How much of the XPCom api is available through Jetpack?
b) Is there an IDE I can setup that will allow me to get autocompletion for extension development?
c) Is there an API browser for XPCom objects listing the objects, the methods available on them and the minimum version of Firefox that supports the particular api? Having a searchable index would be even better.
d) When I was working on a Firefox extension I often got the feeling that I was doing something suboptimal because the development process seemed pretty broken. I was building extensions and had to restart the browser for them to take effect, getting a debugger going was more work than it should be, I wondered why isnt the Firefox ui itself written using HTML and css. I am hoping that more tutorials and workflow related posts will address many of my concerns.
Knowing the workflow of folks at mozilla will be a huge help to people like me who are working on writing extensions because the road to writing a meaningful extension is not as straightforward as it could be.
In the end I dont want the above points to act as a downer in a software release post and would like to congratulate folks at Mozilla about the great work that they do.
Jetpack is preferred because it's easier to write, reduces compatibility problems between versions (because there are fewer "hooks" into deep FF innards), and you don't have to restart to install, uninstall, or reload them. Of course there are limitations, but unless you really need something in XUL that's not available in Jetpack, Jetpack is the way to go.
