How to start developing Mozilla Firefox addons?

Guide me on the appropriate technologies to learn to start developing Mozilla firefox a开发者_如何学编程ddons & later addons for Songbird & Thunderbird.

What all technologies and softwares are needed. I use ubuntu 9.10 64 bit.

Which type of addons?

1. Extensions: JavaScript and XUL. You can get started here.
2. Plugins: NPAPI, the Gecko Plugin API. You can read the complete guide here.

There is a nice wizard for generating extension skeletons.

Basiclly, if you are using this wizard, you will need to know primarly JavaScript.

The best way to start is to go the Mozilla Extensions (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions) page and see what interests you.

For building addons (called Extensions on Mozilla) you can see the page here (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_an_Extension) where it shows you in details how to create a Hello World extension.

There's an extensive tutorial here: http://www.rietta.com/firefox/index.html

For more, visit Mozilla Extension page.

If you're trying to write a Firefox extension, here's a post on mozilla's blog about that : How to develop a Firefox extension

Maybe this tutorial can help, too : How to create Firefox extensions (It's a bit old, though...)

JetPack might be of interest if you want to get some quick and dirty implementations using nothing but JavaScript and some CSS rules.