Staying Flexible: Develop in Another Environment

I've been doing a little work on a Firefox Extension lately, and I've gotta say, it's stretching me in very different ways compared to the development work that I usually do. That's true of any environment that's new to you.

In any environment where you do a lot of development, you reach a point where everything is either pretty clear, or at least pretty familiar. It's true that I've never written a line of Struts code, but having done work in several other Java web development environment, I'm pretty sure that I could pick up Struts with a minimum of confusion.

The same isn't true of building a firefox extension -- I don't have a broad knowledge base to fall back on. It just took me about an hour to get a shortcut key added to a sidebar, even with a working example, and I'm still not entirely sure how working bit of XUL differs from the original bit of XUL that wasn't, for reasons unknown, working.

While it's a little frustrating not knowing what I'm doing, and wishing the documentation were better, at the same time, I'm inclined to believe that doing some work in another environment is good for me, increases my flexibility, and my sense for the available options.

Double-Click Protection in Firefox

A common class of errors in web applications is failing to handle the same request twice, as occurs when a user impatiently clicks a link or a button a second time while the first request is taking longer than usual.

Recently, someone reported an issue just like that on an application we develop: If you click an image button twice, the system gets, shall we say, cranky. This morning, I attempted to verify it using Firefox 2.0.X, and couldn't do it.

I tried the same thing in Internet Explorer 7.X, and voila. No problem, error verified.

That seems to imply that Firefox (or possibly one of the extensions I use) is protecting me from a multiple-submit problem. Interesting. I wasn't able to turn up anything in a quick Google search; does anyone know more about this?

Access Keys in Firefox 2: Alt-Shift

I was having trouble using the access keys (e.g. keyboard hot keys) in Jira this afternoon. I don't use them regularly, so I didn't know what was likely to have changed since I last used them.

To go to the next item in the search, Jira was suggesting "ALT+N". I pressed "Alt" and "n", to no avail. Out of curiosity, after demonstrating to a colleague, I tried "Alt+Shift+n" to replicate the case of the 'N'. That worked.

A little research later, and I wasn't even convinced that the access key definition in the Html specification was intended to be case-sensitive or not. Fortunately, my colleague tried it in Firefox 1.5, and discovered that it worked for him, which made me suspicious.

A quick search on Atlassian's Jira instance later, and the answer was clear: Firefox 2.0 changed the access-key invocation sequence from Alt- to Alt-Shift-, and the tooltip on my Jira instance hasn't caught up yet.

So: if you're like me, and you don't use access keys very often in Firefox, this may be news to you as well.