A sample bootstrapped extension to add a Web panel sidebar.
The window.sidebar.addPanel function has been removed from Firefox 23. That means the ability to add a traditional sidebar panel is no longer available from Web content. Web publishers can still provide a Firefox sidebar either by the new Social API or a standalone Firefox extension.
For the convenience of Web developers, I have made a restartless extension that simply adds a Web panel, like the legacy API. You can utilize this work to create your own sidebar Web panel.
This is just a sample extension. First, you have to fork or clone the repository and edit the code under the source directory.
bootstrap.jscontains the logic as you can see. Change thebasenamevariable to your own. You don't have to touch the other part of the code.install.rdfcontains the meta data. Modify theid,name,description,version,creator,homepageURLandlocalizedproperties. Remove the existinglocalizedproperties if you don't have any localization. See Install Manifests for details.locales.jsoncontains the localized strings as well as the sidebar URL. Add or remove your own locales. Theshortcut-keyandshortcut-modifiersproperties set a keyboard shortcut to open and close the sidebar. In this sample, it will be Ctrl+Alt+P on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Alt+P on Mac. See Keyboard Shortcuts for details.
Once your customization is done, pack it. Archive those three files into a single ZIP file using your favorite archiver. A shell script using the 7-Zip command line program is also available under the bin directory. Note that archiving the containing source directory will not work. Archive the three files, then rename the ZIP file to an arbitrary name ending with a xpi file extension, like the sample simple-sidebar.xpi file under the bundles directory. That's it. Now you can drag and drop the XPI file onto your Firefox browser window to install. Hooray!
Drop a line to Kohei.