Creating a new Tab from a FireFox Extension

Here is a quick tip on how you can create a new tab that opens to a specified URL via a FireFox extension:

	var myUrl = "http://mesh.typepad.com";
	var tBrowser = document.getElementById("content");
	var tab = tBrowser.addTab(myUrl);

Post any improvements and / or tips in the comments.

Comments

[mike chambers]

fyi, if you want the new tab to add focus, then add this line to the end of the code snippet:

tBrowser.selectedTab = tab;

mike chambers

[Keith]

Hi,
Since you know which tab your created, is there a way to use that tab to open a document without selecting that tab? Also, is there a way to check if the tab still exists?

Thanks for your help,
Keith

[mike chambers]

Yes. The tab will automatically open the URL in the background.

If you want to open a different url, try this:

var uri = "http://mesh.typepad.com";
tBrowser.getBrowserForTab(tab).loadURI(uri);

that should do it.

mike chambers

[Antonio]

I'm just a beginner on all this, and I was trying to make Firefox do that from a sidebar.

Turns out (after much banging on the wall on my part) that, as it was a separate document, and the root element wasn't a browser but a page, getElementById("content") doesn't work.

In that case, just replace that line with:
var tBrowser = top.document.getElementById("content");

Being a XUL/DOM n00b is hard on your nerves. :-)

Or am I doing something wrong? =/

[Another Bit Of Info]

show HTML in new tab

addTab only accepts URLs, not HTML, but you can cheat and convert a URL
to HTML something like this:
var url = "data:text/html;charset=UTF-8," + encodeURIComponent(html);
getBrowser().addTab(url);