A Quick Firefox Extension Building Tip

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This tip won’t apply to a good number of you, but should you happen to find yourself building a Firefox extension on a Mac, or messing with someone else’s (with their permission, of course), and end up banging your head on your desk because you did everything right and it’s not working… here’s a possible solution. If you’re using the contextual menu option “Compress…” in OS X, it’s creating an extra level in the zip file that you’re using for your jar and xpi files. Firefox won’t recurse into that directory, so it’s not finding your install script or your chrome. The simplest solution is to select the files inside the directory you want to turn into an xpi or jar and archive those, then rename and move the file. You can accomplish the same thing using command line tools, but in this case, why bother?