Experiments in GNOMEland

While Epiphany is the default browser of GNOME, and it’s a great browser (I use it from time to time), Firefox is still my brower of choice, especially since it’s so extensible.

One of the very interesting features that came with Gecko 2 (the “engine” powering Firefox 4, Thunderbird 3.3, Seamonkey 2.1) is ctypes, a feature which «makes it possible to call C-compatible foreign library functions from JavaScript code without having to write your own binary XPCOM component». Many «desktop» runtimes (gjs, python) already allow that, but not having to mess with XPCOM, IDL and friends to get the same in Firefox is a huge plus!

Wanting to experiment with this feature, I wrote a very small module to export your bookmarks to Tracker. There no UI or bells or whistles, it just sits in the background and does its job. Because it’s pure Javascript, there’s no compilation involved, just install the plugin and you’re good to go. Now, why would you like to export your bookmarks to Tracker? Well, I’ve also pushed a branch called “needle-bookmarks” which, guess what, allows the Tracker search tool (aka needle) to query bookmarks too! And it’s just a matter of time before you get that into the search of the Shell overview…

Obligatory screenshot

How to get the code

1. Clone git://git.mymadcat.com/tracker-firefox
2. Generate the XPI with git archive --format=zip HEAD > tracker-firefox.xpi and install it in Firefox
3. Get the needle-bookmarks branch of tracker (hopefully merged into master soon) from its git repository
4. Search your bookmarks 🙂

Future ideas

I think it would be interesting to extend the plugin to add a history observer that would log events to Zeitgeist… Zeitgeist already has a Firefox plugin, but unless it has been fixed since last time I checked, it’s not working with Gecko 2. We’re in any case working more and more together with the Zeitgeist guys to make sure the Gnome 3.1 search experience will be greatly enhanced!