archived-content VS firefox-scripts

Yes we can still create uc.js in 2022. MDN no longs serve the XUL doc. However we can search their archived doc repo, e.g. https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/search?q=nsIPrefServ...

MDN used to have some good documentation, back before webextensions when it was expected that third-party addon developers would be modifying the frontend directly. that's no longer supported though, so all those juicy pages on XUL and XPCOM have been removed. they can still be found on here but not in a very useful format.

it's archived on here but the pictures are missing so it's just... fucked honestly. I am so frustrated and aggravated by this. it makes it that much harder for someone to pick this up as a hobby, which makes it that much harder for firefox to find new contributors. anyway, frame scripts are a bit annoying to use. but since about:newtab is a firefox system page (it has a system principal), addons can't inject anything into it either. so you couldn't use greasemonkey or something.

The page source can be found at the mdn-archive

For a long time, I've been making use of a MacOS-esque scrollbar I found online. I'm using XiaoXiaoFlood's loader script, and I've made the necessary changes to the files mentioned here to make it able to load .js and .uc.js files again. I've also modified the script a fair bit, though reverted most as it didn't work. Currently, I'm using this one, which has simply commented out the things that rely on Services. Though, even if I add it with something like const Services = globalThis.Services || ChromeUtils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm").Services; it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using a userChrome.xml file, but that doesn't do much anymore. Was around 72/75 where that stopped working right?

Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.

As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).

This is what you're looking for.

Heads up though, it doesn't work for most tooltips. For that, I found the only way to change them is to use the above code in an agentsheet (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts, see the "StyloaiX" section)

Bootstrapped extensions are supported (really, xiaoxiaoflood is the only one who maintains any popular ones).

depending on your needs existing extensions may work for you, though the ContentScript based implementations have issues, if that's not enough you can use https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts as it allows you to run the code in the browser UI, unfortunately there's no easy to use extension (and sadly FireGestures require update to work, even with loader injected into Quantum) so you may need to work with the code a bit (or more)

do what exactly? inject code? there are many slightly different approaches, the most reliable seems to be https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts and using an approach like that forks can add extra configs to the UI making users' lives easier

Not in the foreseeable future, but maybe achievable with userChromeJS.