I’m still keen as ever and enjoying the experience of developing a browser extension. Last week was the first time I hung out in Google Hangouts with Jan and Florent. On first impressions Google hangouts is pretty sweet. It was smooth and clear(I’m not sure how much of that was down to broadband speeds and connection quality). I learnt so much in that first one hour session and enjoyed chatting to them face-to-face (in digital terms).

TOO COOL to Minify & TOO SASS’y for tools

One of things I learnt was how to approach JS/CSS now my front-end Developer head tells me to always minify and concatenate files to reduce HTTP request. While from a maintenance side, look to using a CSS pre-processor for variables etc. Now when it comes to developing browser extensions you do not have the same issues because of the following reasons:

1. No HTTP requests are done because the files are actually packaged with the extension and therefore installed on the client machine anyway. Theres also NO network latency because of this.
2. File sizes aren’t that important as browser extensions (for Firefox at least). The extensions are packaged up in such an effective way that its basically zipping all the contents together so “reducing” the file sizes anyway.
3. Whilst attempting to fix an issue I came across Mozilla’s implementation of CSS variables, which sort of solves the issue around css variables and modularise the code.

Later today, I’m scheduled to hangout with Jan again and I’m thinking about writing another post about XUL

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https://alistairlaing.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/right-tool-for-the-job/