Ported Chrome extension, now need to debug

Add-ons Development
#1

Hi there everyone!

This is going to become painfully obvious very shortly but just to end the suspense, I’m not an extension developer and am just trying to muddle through porting a Chrome extension to Firefox. Please forgive my ignorance in these matters but I promise I’m trying to get as far as possible while keeping the forum bother to a minimum.

I wanted to port this exif viewer to Firefox. After a lot of searching, I found the Mozilla developer page dedicated to this process so my next step was to run the addon through the extension tester, which resulted in no errors.

My next step was to install the Chrome Store Foxified addon which was designed to automate the addon port and install process. That also went without a hitch and the addon is currently installed and activated.

The intended result of using that addon is being able to view the EXIF data of an image by hovering over it and viewing the info in a blue banner at the top of the image. As you might have expected, in Firefox, it’s not doing anything. Well, anything I can see anyways.

I’ve begun to search how to view extension errors but I’m finding a lot of SE posts from 4 years ago but nothing new enough to trust.

Could someone maybe set me straight on what I should be doing next(and how to go about it)? I’d love to get this extension working.

Any thoughts or insight are welcome. Thanks for your time!

#2

Hi, firefox devtools are the tool of choice.

To debug content script you can just type Ctrl+Shift+K to open a Web Console.

To debug background scripts you click the Debug link for the extension in question in the tab visiting about:debugging#addons

#3

Hi there Adrian and thanks so much for taking the time to help me out!

CTRL+SHIFT+K doesn’t do anything in my browser(Firefox beta on Debian). Do I need to install or enable something to access it?

I did enable bugging and opened the debug window for the addon:

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image.jpg1366×768 431 KB

but I’m not seeing any error data to start with. I went across the tabs along the top, refreshed the page with images included that should trigger the addon and went through the file tree on the left side of the popup but just can’t see anything that raises any alarm bells.

I apologize for my ignorance in this matter and can appreciate the frustration of explaining something like this to a luddite but could you provide any further(and more detailed) information on tracking down what’s broken in the addon?

Thanks for your time!

#4

I assume you’re using a content script to manipulate the page. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Debugging#Debugging_content_scripts (or any of the other parts of that article) for where to look for them, however errors will not be shown in the page console afaik, but instead in the browser console (which is also the console you get in the add-on debugger).

#5

Thanks very much for the link Martin, I’ll get to reading it right away!

#6

I am using Nightly Firefox. Try accessing the web console via Tools->Web Developer->Web Console.

You don’t need to install anything, but see devtools settings to enable remote debugging and enable browser chrome and add-on debugging toolboxes.

MDN will be your friend for details: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools