1
FoxAlert Extension for Mozilla Firefox Web
Browser
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa
K.K. Pavithra De Alwis
070080F@uom.lk
Abstract—Natural hazards by its nature affect the human life
in various ways. It causes financial, environmental and human
losses. If the hazard occurred in an unexpected moment, the
results become much worse. Being informed about a hazard will
let the people the time to take necessary actions. Within that
context this paper discusses FoxAlert extension; a solution for
keeping Mozilla firefox users awareness about the natural
hazards by giving alerts. It provides the users with the nearly
real time alerts about natural disasters like Earthquakes,
Tsunamis, Tropical cyclones, Floods and volcanoes. The
extension gets the necessary information through RSS feeds.
I. INTRODUCTION
N atural hazards have become a controversial issue due
to the fact that most of the people worldwide have
already experienced at least one of those situations. It causes
serious damages not only to the environment, property and but
also to the human life. They bring various ill effects to the
human life. The most pathetic situation of these hazards is the
loss of valuable human lives.
When the hazards comes unexpectedly thus giving no time to
be prepared, the situation become worse. It is quite obvious in
each incident; the losses could have been significantly reduced
if the people were informed through a proper alerting system.
The few minutes time, which is before the impact of natural
disaster is very important. Informing those vulnerable people
about the hazard in that particular time, will let them to take
necessary actions. This method will significantly reduce
deaths, injuries, and property damages caused by all natural
disasters.
Existing approaches to get natural hazard alerts are mentioned
below.
Users can subscribe for early warning system to get relevant
alerts by paying an amount. The user will receive alerts to his
mobile phone through SMS(Short Message Service).
There are some other sites, which user can register and receive
e-mail notifications about natural hazards.
Users also can subscribe to a RSS(Really Simple Syndication)
feeds which provide feeds about natural hazards through
existing RSS reader.
The “FoxAlert” gives a simple solution for Mozilla Firefox
web browser users to get those alerts through their browser. It
is an extension that gives alerts about natural hazards to the
user as a popup message. The developer of the FoxAlert
extension addresses vulnerable people of natural hazards such
as earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, floods and
volcanoes as well as web users who are interested on that
news. Activation of the extension allows web user to receive
near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world.
It automatically updates news in every five minutes or it can
be done manually even by second. The extension uses RSS
feeds published by GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and
Coordination System) to display alerts.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Firefox architecture
Firefox architecture supports for the custom extensions. As
James Edwards the author of "Build Your Own Firefox
Extension" says, One of the most sophisticated features in
Firefox, and arguably the most significant reason for its
continued popularity among developers, is its framework for
custom extensions.[1]According to the authors of "Conceptual
Architecture of Firefox", Firefox comes with a powerful
extension capability, which allows extensions to alter the
behaviour of the browser at various stages of the architecture.
The application is comprised of several independent
components layered together to form what is commonly called
a layered architecture.
A layered architecture is used to simply the design and
maintainability of the code. Like the OSI model, the
conceptual architecture provides interfaces for higher level
components to interact with lower level components. This
allows each component to be built in isolation, as long as each
component adheres to a defined interface. The layered
architecture promotes code reuse by allowing other
applications the ability to easily include individual
components (Epiphany, the official web browser of the
GNOME project uses the Mozilla Engine but provides
different user interface). As the software application evolves 2

components can be swapped out for new implementations
without affecting the components in layer above or below.[2 ]
A. A reference architecture diagram of the Firefox
architecture is depicted in Figure 1.
B.Mozilla developer center guide
Mozilla developer center tutorials provide a comprehensive
guide for less experienced firefox extension developers.
Mozilla Developer Centre (MDC), started in early 2005, is
the official Mozilla Foundation website for development
documentation and news about Firefox, Thunderbird, and
other Mozilla Foundation projects. It is intended to supplant
the community-driven aspect of documents authored for the
mozilla.org website.[citation needed] To accomplish this, the
website uses wiki software to maintain user-editable
documents rather than CVS commits, as used for mozilla.org
and determined to be too unwieldy shortly after MDC's
inception.[3]
C. Other extension guide sites
Shortest tutorial for firefox extension toolbar
development.[4]
Getting started with extension development[5]
D. Other firefox extensions which has the same functionalities
Source code of weatherbug-2.0.0.4-fx[6]
Gives live, local weather conditions in Firefox with the
Weather Bug extension. Featuring forecasts, radar, and severe
weather alerts from WeatherBug's community of
neighbourhood weather.
Webmail_notifier-1.5.3-fx [7]
Webmail Notifier checks users webmail accounts and notifies
the number of unread emails.
infoRSS[8]
Displays RSS, Atom, Twitter, parsed HTML and NNTP feed
in a scrolling area in the status bar. Compatible with
podcasting RSS which can be downloaded directly. It's also a
good Google email notifier.
2
eQuake Alert[9]
eQuake Alert is a free Firefox add on which delivers
earthquake alerts direct to your browser.
It was needed to went through the source code of four FF add-
ons which are having the same functionality (pop up
messages, menu, get weather alerts) as in this project and RSS
capabilities.
F. GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System).
Natural hazards are taking place more frequently nowadays
than in the past. So, the need of an effective natural hazard
warning system is obvious. Reliability of the alerts is a
primary concern for such a system. This extension receives its
warning information from GDACS(Global Disaster Alert and
Coordination System).According to the GDACS, it is a
cooperation framework under the United Nations umbrella
with the aim to consolidate and strengthen the network of
providers and users of disaster information worldwide in order
to provide reliable and accurate alerts and impact estimations
after sudden-onset disasters and to improve the cooperation of
international responders in the immediate aftermath of major
natural, technological and environmental disasters.[10]
G. RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
The extension receives its information as RSS (Really Simple
Syndication) feeds. According to the information given in
Technology center at Harvard Law RSS is a Web content
syndication format. It is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must
conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.RSS version
2.0 specification format was used to parse RSS feeds in this
extension.[11]
III. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
The “FoxAlert” is a firefox extension which gives alerts about
natural hazards to the user as popup messages. It uses RSS
feeds to get the alerts. When the user installs the FoxAlert
extension, a small icon in status bar appears. When the mouse
pointer is pointed to the icon a tool tip appears displaying
“FoxAlert”.
When the user double click on the icon, the homepage of
GDACs opens in a new tab(url-
http://www.gdacs.org/index.asp/). When user right click on
the icon a menu appears .If the user needs to see the latest
updates, he can select “update” from that menu.
When a new alert receives, a notification box which contains
the message will appear.
The project can be divided in to three different modules as
RSS connector, RSS converter and display unit. When the

plug in runs on the mozilla web browser, it search for the
alerts. If there are any feed available, RSS connector gets that
feed. Data alert unit is also responsible for storing subscription
data. Then alert unit send this data to RSS converter. It converts
the RSS message in to a human readable format. After that,
formatted message is sent to the display unit. Using the facilities
provided by mozilla platform, the message is then shown to the
user as a popup message.
Core technology that extensions are built with is an XML
language called XUL (eXtensible User-interface Language),
which defines interface components from simple tags. Java
script was used to wrote functions.
A. Overview
The plugin is consists of three layers primarily.
• Upper layer will handle the connection establishment with
Rss feeds and parsing feeds
• Middle layer will do formatting of data.
• Last layer will handle the display tasks
Various RSS feed urls were combined in to one url using
available facility in feedstich website (http://feedstitch.com/)
Functionality of Fox Alert depends on following files.
GUI of foxAlert is consists of following XUL files.
Statusbar.xul :
User interface of the extention is defined in this class.
Displaying icon in the status bar, tool tips, context menu and
sub menu is done by this XUL file.
Options.xul :
Implements the user interface for collecting user preferences.
Eg: update interval.
Help.xul :
Display general guide for using FoxAlert to the users in a
separate dialog box.
About.xul :
Display the details of the developer in a separate dialog.
Functionality of FoxAlert depends on following JavaScript
files.
statubar.js
contains all the functions and implementations needed to
handle the operations in statusbar gui .When the window
loads, it loads saved or default preference values and register
preference observers to monitor changes in preference
settings. It creates a XMLHttpconnection and get feeds from
3
given feed URL. Then it sends that feed to rss parser (rss.js)
and get processed data. Finally it gives a notification to user
about new update and displays in GUI.
Rss.js
rss.js file contains functions and implementations needed to
parse the response text received from XMLHttp request. It
parses the rss feed and gets the relevent data from that feed
and returns them.
Options.js
Options.js file includes all the functions and implementations
needed to get and set user preference values through the
preference dialog.
B. Size and Performance
Size of the plugin will not be more than the size of typical
FF plugin. So it will not degrade the performance of FF.
Performance will be also depending on RSS feeds.
C. Quality
The plugin can be developed to register user location, so
that he can get alerts relevant to his area. The plugin will
support for further development as its architecture allows.
End product will also have a nice, user friendly interface.
Reliability will be fairly depending on the RSS feeds.
D. Constraints
The time allocated for the project is a major constraint.
User should have installed FF in prior to use the plug in
Plug in is only available in English language
D. Assumptions and dependencies
User has installed FF.
User knows how to enter URL for subscription.
User is able to work in English
iv. RESULTS
Final result of the project was a XPI file. Firefox browser
identified it as a valid firefox extension and installed it. After
installation, it displayed an icon in the status bar.
Firefox add-ons list
Preview of a new message
 4

[10] GDACS home page:

http://www.gdacs.org/about.asp

[11] RSS 2.0 specification

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

The extension successfully received some alerts and displayed

them as popup messages.

v. CONCLUSION

This paper was about FoxAlert extension which gives alerts

about natural hazards to the Mozilla Firefox users. Natural
hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, floods
and volcanoes, and all other disasters occur frequently around
the world. In all these incidents, the importance of an effective
alerting system is highlighted. Such application can mitigate
human and property losses in a significant way.
The FoxAlert extension will be more useful to the people
who live in those vulnerable areas.

REFERENCES

[1]” Build Your Own Firefox Extension” by James Edwards

[2]Conceptual Architecture of Firefox

http://web.uvic.ca/~hitchner/assign1.pdf
Andre Campos - 0230481 - drick@uvic.ca
Bryan Lane - 0434698 - blane@uvic.ca
Neal Clark - 0429078 - nclark@uvic.ca
Sunpreet Jassal - 0323709 - ssjassal@uvic.ca
Stephen Hitchner - 0430473 - hitchner@uvic.ca

[3]Mozilla Developer Center

https://developer.mozilla.org/

[4] Shortest tutorial for firefox extension toolbar development

http://devilsworkshop.org/shortest-tutorial-for-firefox-
extensiontoolbar-development/

[5] Getting started with extension development

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_dev
elopment

[6] weatherbug-2.0.0.4-fx
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2455

[7] webmail_notifier-1.5.3-fx
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4490

[8] InfoRSS
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5459

[9]eQuake Alert
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2239