Now, I know that I had originally told you that I’d be working on Thunderbird + Unity integration<\/a>.\u00a0 That’s still on my TODO list, but today, I put some contributions in with the Firefox team for the upcoming Firefox 4 release<\/a>.\u00a0 There are still a few bugs that need to be squashed before Firefox 4 is ready for the prime-time, and we’re all psyched to see it happen, so I lent a hand.<\/p>\n This was the bug I decided to tackle today.<\/a> Basically, in the new add-ons manager, add-ons are listed alphabetically, regardless of their state (and by state, I mean enabled, disabled, incompatible, blocked, etc).\u00a0 This leads to kind of a strip-ey look for large numbers of add-ons.<\/p>\n What we’d like instead is to have the add-ons grouped by state, and then sorted alphabetically within that state.\u00a0 Here’s a mock-up by bug-reporter (and Firefox UX team member) Jennifer Boriss:<\/p>\n I got to work around 8:45AM this morning.\u00a0 Around 10:13AM, I had finished most of my introductions, had my tour, had my accounts set up, found my desk, and started work.<\/p>\n The first thing I did was locate where exactly the code was for listing the add-ons.\u00a0 Blake<\/a> pointed out a particularly useful resource called MXR (Mozilla Cross Reference)<\/a>, which lets me search through the source code very quickly.\u00a0 I had originally been using grep<\/a>, but this was way better.<\/p>\n My approach to finding the code:\u00a0 I find a string in the interface that seems unique to the area I’m working in (in this case, it was “Search all add-ons”, which is found in the search text input of the add-ons manager).\u00a0 I did a search for that string, and it returned the file \ufeff\ufeffmozilla-central\/toolkit\/locales\/en-US\/chrome\/mozapps\/extensions\/extensions.dtd.<\/p>\n But this only takes us half-way.\u00a0 Since Firefox is translated, the strings are stored separately from where they’re used.\u00a0 In extensions.dtd, the string I searched for is given the key “search.placeholder”.<\/p>\n Searching for “search.placeholder” with MXR gives me paydirt:\u00a0 mozilla-central\/toolkit\/mozapps\/extensions\/content\/ holds the files extensions.css, extensions.js, extensions.xul and extensions.xml.<\/p>\n So I tool around in extensions.js a bit, reading the developer documentation<\/a>, and getting to know the code.\u00a0 The code contains quite a few classes, including something called gViewController.\u00a0 Digging deeper into it, it looks like gViewController controls (brings up, shuts down) the various “views” available in the add-ons manager.\u00a0 Cool – so now I just need to find the view that lists the user’s add-ons.<\/p>\n Ah hah!\u00a0 Found it:\u00a0 gListView.\u00a0 gListView grabs all of the installed (or to-be-installed) add-ons, and populates the interface.\u00a0 So this is where the sorting needs to happen.\u00a0 I tested to make sure I was in the right place in the code by using dump calls to a terminal<\/a>.\u00a0 Bonus:\u00a0 edits in this portion of the code do not require a full browser restart – instead, I just close and reopen the add-ons manager to see my changes.\u00a0 Nice!<\/p>\n Initially, my idea was to have 4 “buckets”, one for each of the 4 states (“enabled”, “incompatible”, “disabled”, “blocked”).\u00a0 I’d divide up the add-ons into those 4 buckets, and then sort each bucket, and then join the 4 buckets for the final result.<\/p>\n Blake came up with a better solution: the Schwartzian Transform<\/a> (straight out of Space Balls<\/a>, I know).\u00a0 The idea is that, instead of having separate buckets like before, we just go through the entire collection of add-ons, and “label” them based on what bucket they belong to.\u00a0 Then we sort the entire collection, giving the bucket-label a high-order sorting priority.\u00a0 It sounds complicated, but it actually wasn’t that difficult to code.\u00a0 It’s a tiny piece of code, its readable, and quite elegant.\u00a0 So kudos to Blake for that solution.<\/p>\n![\"Add-ons](\"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/addons_inlist_accordingtostatus-237x300.png\" "\\"Add-ons")
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