WebExtensions/SummerOfCode2020

This is the WebExtensions's GSoC 2020 "Frequently Asked Questions" wiki page, in particular related to the "Extension Activity Monitor" project proposal.

What is the best way to contact you?

The best way to contact us is by joining Mozilla’s Matrix instance on https://chat.mozilla.org. Please say hi and feel welcome to ask questions about this project in the “Add-ons” room. If you need help setting up your Firefox development environment, please ask for help in the “Introduction” room. You can also talk to other applicants and project mentors in the GSOC2020 room.

Sending an email to the project mentors is also a good way to contact us, but we ask that you CC the other mentors, so we can respond faster and keep track of the emails that have not been answered yet.

How do I get started with this project?

If you are new to the browser extensions, a good starting point is the WebExtensions wiki page on MDN. You can use the documentation available on MDN to start to build a small extension for Firefox. You can also find more information about the Firefox extension ecosystem on https://extensionworkshop.com.

There are a few ways you can start contributing to this project. You do not need to do all of these activities!

• You can become more familiar with the activityLog API by experimenting with the API itself. As the API is still in development, there is no official documentation available yet. The development of this API was tracked on Bugzilla at Bug 1542402 (see the referenced bugs for more information).

• You can practice using the WebExtensions API by contributing to one of Mozilla’s officially supported extensions. As an example, here are some good-first-bugs related to the “Firefox Color” extension: https://github.com/mozilla/FirefoxColor/labels/good%20first%20issue

• You can contribute to the WebExtensions API by fixing one of these good-first-bugs in Firefox. Having additional experience extending or fixing bugs in the API itself is definitely a “bonus” skill for an applicant that we would appreciate and take into account. We recommend reading our onboarding documentation to help you get started with fixing bugs in Firefox. If you have any questions or issues when setting up your developer environment, please join Mozilla’s Matrix instance and ask for help in the “Introduction” room. If you have questions on this project or issues with WebExtensions APIs, you may ask for help “Add-ons” room.

Is the project goal to build something like the extension activity log available on Chrome?

Yes, the project goal is to develop a feature similar to the one provided by Chrome, but it doesn’t have to be an exact copy, nor to be limited to the feature set Chrome provides (in terms of both features and UI).

Hg clone fails to complete successfully, is there any other way to get mozilla-central content downloaded?

This is usually due to connection issues.

As a workaround it is possible to manually download a bundle and use mercurial hg command to init an empty mercurial repository and unbundle the content of mozilla-central downloaded into it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Source_Code/Mercurial/Bundles

How to use Mercurial while working on Mozilla code?

Mike Conley wrote a very nice document that captures common usage patterns: https://mikeconley.github.io/documents/How_mconley_uses_Mercurial_for_Mozilla_code