I'm a fan of the textarea resize function in Safari 3 - and as such I've had my first crack at a Firefox extension.

Download the Firefox text sizer extension

UK EVENTAttend ffconf.org 2024

The conference for people who are passionate about the web. 8 amazing speakers with real human interaction and content you can't just read in a blog post or watch on a tiktok!

No doubt this has been written already (please do let me know and put me out of my pain), but like I said it was to give it a go, and, as with most things, here's how it was done.

Start off with the script

I wrote a straight JavaScript file to allow me to resize the text boxes. I wrote a simple page to test it with, dropped on three textarea boxes and tested so it all worked.

Here's the original source code.

I tried to encapsulate all the code within one variable to avoid any conflicts with code on the page already.

Add some grease

By renaming the file to .user.js I was able to use it as a Greasemonkey plugin. Which meant that the script was automatically called each time the page was loaded - exactly what I needed.

Cheat

After messing around with Firefox extensions for a couple of days and getting nowhere, I changed tack. I realised that Greasemonkey was definitely the way to go, and after searching for a bit, I found the solution: a tool that converts Greasemonkey scripts to Firefox extensions.

Result

I'm still fairly clueless about how to write a pure Firefox extension, but then on the other hand, I've no need to know how to right now.

If there are any bugs please do let me know.