There’s been a lot of discussion about the Preferences Toolbar again recently. Grey Hodge blogged about the lack of an updated Prefbar install for Firefox2, and asked if anyone knew anything. I felt he might be interested in knowing what was really going on, so I resurrected a post from my old blog (I never got around to copying them all over) where I explained what happened with the Prefbar project and why I don’t work on it anymore. A lot of people seem to have found their way to this blog from there, many of whom have commented that I should really just start a new project (or a fork of the old one) with a different name and let the other guy do (or not do) what he wants with “his” Prefbar. I am definitely considering doing this, and although I might not have time to do any serious development on it until after the holidays, I plan to start soliciting feature suggestions and feedback in the very near future. In fact, if you’ve got anything you’d like to see in a prefbar-like next generation firefox preference and option management tool, please add them as a comment to this post. Name suggestions would also be appreciated.

In the mean time, we need to get the existing Prefbar working with Firefox 2 as quickly as possible. I have a version, available for download, that seems to mostly work. All I did was change the maximum version number field in the installer to 2.0 (it was 1.5), but as there weren’t any major backend XUL or preferences engine changes that I know of between 1.5 and 2.0, that might be enough. Please check it out and let me know if it installs and works correctly on your machine. All such reports can be sent as blog comments (or through the XulPlanet contact form) until I get something better figured out.

Thanks everyone for your enthusiasm and support.

Aa

Well, 2.0 is finally out. For real this time. Am I the only one who’s seeing the bug where the scrolling in the chat windows in gmail is broken in 2.0? Other than that everything seems great, and I already couldn’t live without the automatic inline spell checking.

I was all planning on posting a huge long summary of the Mozilla Accessibility Summit in Boston earlier in the month, but I came back with the flu. By the time I got over it, everybody else had pretty much already covered everything in other blogs. Guess I’ll try again next year…

For anyone who wrote an extension for Firefox 1.5, remember that now is the time to update your theme for compatibility with Firefox 2.0. Often this will be as simple as running a verification test and then changing the maximum version information in your install.rdf file; other themes might require some slight fixing, but nothing big. Writing your updated version now (and getting it listed in your update rdf file) will ensure a seamless transition for everyone who uses your extension when Firefox 2.0 final is released (real soon now).