Use the chat feature on Facebook? One thing that it really lacks is a way to keep a history of who you talked to and what was said.  Thankfully though, this add-on – Facebook Chat History Manager – will give you a way to simply browse through your previous Facebook chats.

All the content you wish to browse through is saved locally, and you can browse through your Facebook chat history anytime online or offline. How about your message security? Here is what the developer has to say.

Your messages are securely stored and only person passed the security check can view saved messages.Note that all messages are stored in your client, this application won’t store your chat history on server.

The only downside I see to this, is when you are installing – the add-on looks for your Facebook ID number, rather than your user name.  That might confuse some users.  Other than that, it is a great start to a very interesting extension.

You can pick up the Facebook Chat History Manager from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Anthony is one of the driving forces behind that project, so I thought it would be fun to pick his brain to find out what his part in the project is, and what advice he might have for other hopeful Greasemonkey script writers or Firefox add-on developers.

What all have you done in development for the Firefox Greasemonkey extension?

I’ve definitely lost track of when and how exactly I first learned about Greasemonkey, and when I got involved.  Luckily, I can look up enough old records to get a pretty good idea of what the right answer here is.

I first interacted with Greasemonkey as a user.  Quickly though I graduated to User Script author.  My earliest blog post about a script I authored was in March of 2005.  I wrote a few scripts, some quite popular, for a while.  By June, Mark Pilgrim contacted me about being included in the “Greasemonkey Hacks” book, essentially a cookbook-like collection of existing User Scripts, with discussion about what they were and how they worked.  I was included as a contributor when that book was published.

I am first credited in a commit message from November, 2006.  That’s when I first began development of Greasemonkey itself, nearly three years ago.  At the time, the original creator, Aaron Boodman, was very much in charge and I was minimally involved.  Over time, I became more and more involved in the development process.

The first change I made to the source code directly, rather than submitting to the maintainers and being recognized for, was in February of 2007.  It was a very gradual process from there, but by some time in 2008 I was one of the more recognized authorities within the development community.  Finally, in August of 2009, the project’s original creator stepped down from the role of primary developer, handing the reins to myself and Johan Sundström, leaving me in the “co-lead” role with Johan.

Development progress over time has been relatively slow.  On one hand, Greasemonkey serves its purpose quite well, so doesn’t need to change very much.  On the other, there was a more complicated and difficult process for agreeing to and including changes.  Now that I’m more “in charge” than ever, I (along with Johan) am hoping to make it easier for Greasemonkey to progress, in the future.

As far as scripting and coding goes, how did you get started and what would you suggest somebody who wants to write their own Greasemoney script or Firefox add-on go to learn more on how to do so?

I’ve been programming since I was 10 or 11 years old.  Even earlier than that, I did “programming” by typing source code from a magazine into the Atari BASIC interpreter.  By my teens I was writing little programs, and by college I was beginning to learn PHP.  I got involved heavily in web development, and have been doing that professionally for six years now.

I was interested in Firefox extension development from the word go. Back in the 1.x days, however, tutorials and documentation was sparse, varied, and confusing.  Luckily today these problems have been solved. Mechanisms in Firefox 2 and 3 help make extension development easier, and both documentation and examples are much easier to find and understand.

I actually tried, and failed, to make my own extensions a few times. I finally got my first one running in June of 2005. Since then I’ve made a few of my own, and gotten involved with Greasemonkey.  For new extension authors, the developer.mozilla.org site is definitely the place to go, today.

User scripts are a different beast, and thankfully quite a bit simpler.  If you know javascript, you can probably get your first user script working in just a few minutes.  To learn how, visit the Greasespot Wiki, specifically the Manual.  The “common pitfalls” article by Mark Pilgrim is also very useful.

As an add-on developer, is there anything else you wish that the Mozilla team provided, or do you feel pretty happy with the information and support that they provide to developers?

It’s hard to say.  At this point, I’m a seasoned developer, so most of what I need is in my head.  There are two things that I would really like though:

Something like xulplanet.com’s XPCOM reference. The xulplanet.com site is now dead, giving just a link to the general developer wiki.  This is a good and helpful wiki, *but* has two weaknesses: it covers many disjoint topics (i.e. both web development, and extension development), and lacks the coverage that xulplanet.com
had.  There are many interfaces that, now, are harder to discover and understand.  Since xulplanet went away, I’ve found myself resorting to reading the source directly, which is more difficult to navigate to, and more difficult to read.

Better support for venkman. Venkman, the javascript debugger, was once quite wonderful.  Today, it’s often difficult to find the file you want to access (sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not) and almost impossible to find those that are/are referenced by javascript components.  Venkman seems to have bitrotted a bit.  Personally, even for web development, I strongly prefer it to Firebug for script debugging — it provides a multi-paneled interface that is significantly easier to use, than that of Firebugs, which is designed to fit in that tiny band at the bottom of the browser.

How big of a role has working on Firefox add-ons played in your professional life?

Almost none.  I interviewed for, but ultimately did not accept one position that would have been FF extension development.  My previous job did include creation of one extension, a port of the IE specific add-on that the company made, but was a secondary/side role.

What Firefox add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts are you a fan of?

For extensions, I like FireBug and Firecookie, JSONView, Open In Browser, and Web Developer extensions.

Most of the user scripts I use, I wrote myself.  Of those I find Linkify Plus and Submit in Select to be indispensible.  But I also use Check Range, and Google Reader Quick Links.

For more information on Anthony, what he does and his work – be sure to check out his personal site Arantius.com.  To check out all the Firefox add-ons he has been a part of, you can also check out his profile page on the Mozilla Add-ons web site.  From all the Firefox fans, I would also like to thank Anthony for the work he has done to (in the long run) make Firefox a better browser for all.

If you are a user of the Stylish extension, you will love this little tip.  I use iGoogle, however I never stay on the page long enough to use the embedded chat they included a while back.  However I am happy to say I found a solution. 

Install this Stylish user style:

• Hide iGoogle Chat Tab on iGoogle Home Page

Once doing so, the chat (as you seen in the screenshot above) disappears.  To make it work for me, I had to change:

http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en

to

http://www.google.com/ig

However, once that was done – it worked flawlessly.  An easy hack for a very lovable web page.  Got to love these Stylish user styles!

It isn’t every day that we get the chance to pick the brain and converse with probably one of the most popular Firefox theme designers (and all around pretty cool guy) TwisterMc.  He is best known for the iPox series of themes he has done for Firefox, but also has several other projects worth checking into when you get the time.

To many you are only known as TwisterMc, the brilliant designer that does all those iPox themes for Firefox. Where did the nickname come from?

TwisterMc: I’ve always been fascinated with the weather and especially tornados; even though I’ve never seen one. When it came time to get my own domain, I wanted something that had to do with weather. Since twister was already taken, I added Mc from my last name and came up with TwisterMc.

Where do you draw your inspiration or ideas from when it comes to sitting down and designing a theme from scratch?

TwisterMc: I get inspiration from everything. It could be a web site I came across, cool packaging or just the result of trying a few designs and seeing what I like.

Now your not all just about the Firefox themes, what other side projects have you got going on?

TwisterMc: Besides themes I’ve dabbled in Firefox extensions, WordPress plugins, desktop backgrounds and a few miscellaneous Growl notifications and Apple Scripts. I also operate a lot of web sites that cover a variety of topics.

Now you have done many different themes for Firefox. Out of them all which one would you consider to be your favorite and why?

TwisterMc: Ohh that’s a hard one. I love the one I’m working on at any given moment. If I had to pick one, I really like iPox as it’s where it all started.

With Firefox 3, you were one of the first ones to note that there would need to be some big changes to the current themes to get them up to date with the new look and feel of the newest version of the browser. Are you looking forward to the challenge or wishing Mozilla would have left well enough alone?

TwisterMc: I do like the challenge. Re-working the themes take me back into each and gives me added incentive to polish the themes even more. The only difference this time is that I have a lot more themes to update.

If there was no Firefox, what do you think you would be skinning up instead if anything at all?

TwisterMc: Probably WordPress. I’m a big WordPress fan and I think there are a lot of possibilities with WordPress themes right now. I know how to do it, I just haven’t sat down and done a public theme yet.

Thanks to Thomas (aka the twisted one) for taking the time out to answer a few of my questions. If you know of any other Firefox or Mozilla aficionado you’d like for me to give the shakedown to till they answer some of our questions, let me know.

Get a sidebar with all of your buddies visible while you’re browsing. Get visual notifications when your friends IM you. Drag and drop links and images from web pages right onto your friends!

Your buddies live in your sidebar and you can login to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, and Jabber! The neatest feature I would have to say is the visual notifications letting you know when you get a new message. So does this turn Firefox into an IM client as well as a browser?

Webrunner – WebRunner is based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). The idea behind Webrunner is to make a super light weight browser that is stripped down of all the toolbars, user interface and more so you have a lighter memory footprint and more a a base around the web application you are pointing it at.

Instantbird – This instant messenger client will be Mozilla’s version of Trillian, Pidgin and others that have come before it. That alone should gain it a lot of traction. The basic backbone of the program is up and ready to download right now – but your not yet getting anything other than the ability to say, “I downloaded Instantbird back when it first came out!”. Bring AIM, Yahoo, MSN and others all together the Mozilla way.

I welcome both into the vaguely-related-to Firefox family. From personal use, Instantbird still has a ways to go but Webrunner is looking interesting right now for simple web applications you can’t do without.

The neat thing about Me.dium is it opens up an entire new world that many might not see behind the web site your visiting. Talking with others that might be on the same web page you are on is a neat experience. Also they give you recommendations of other web pages you should visit based on the one you are at right now too.

Browse with friends or make new ones, the possibilities for the future of this application are endless.

If you get tired of it or you don’t want to use it all the time, just click the browser icon to turn it on and off. The tool lives in your sidebar, so you don’t have to worry about messing up the layout or visual of the current web site you are on either.

There is a world behind each web site you visit, so get to exploring!

In case constant SMS Twitter updates weren’t enough, you can now get them in your browser sidebar, using TwitBin. It’s fully functional for Twittering, so you can send and receive messages via this extension to stay forever updated with your Twitter friends.

+ Download and Install the TwitBin Extension for Firefox!

Well first, I guess I should tell you what Gabbly is about. It is a free service that allows you to chat in real time with folks that are on the same Web site as you. Now you can get your chat in a new way – via your sidebar in Firefox. I like this a lot better than the default “floating window” that the chat usually comes in.

+ Download and Install the Gabbly Chat Sidebar Extension for Firefox!

[Learn More About Gabbly's Firefox Extension!]