Introducing the WLE statusbar!

I am very happy to introduce a new killer feature for the Wikipedia Lookup Extension. While working on the new lookup feature I also started playing with one feature I planned from day one. Having an item in the statusbar which could be clicked to display a search box which the user could use to write queries to Wikipedia.

In its initial positing the statusbar just contains a small icon as seen in the screenshot below.
. The icon isn't very cool or created in a good way, but you might see that it looks somewhat like the icon in the about section of the extension.

Expanding the statusbar provides the user with a textbox to enter a query for Wikipedia. In order to save space in the statusbar I decided not to add a button, but instead just handle the "Enter" keyboard event.


I hope that this new feature is something that more people than myself find useful. Regardless of it's success I find it pretty useful and I learnt some more stuff about writing extensions for Firefox. It is sometimes a pain and quite frustrating, but in the end it's worth it.

Tags: firefox+extension wikipedia+lookup+extension