So, as I was saying yesterday, I wrote a simple Firefox extension that just turns the about:config preference for svg.enabled on or off.

Read on to download it.

How to install it
Click here. You'll probably have to tell Firefox that it's okay to install software from my site before it will install for you. Then restart Firefox (as with any extension).

How to use it

It's a button with a dropdown arrow, like the browser back button. The main button shows the current state of the svg.enabled preference. It has to be clicked once before it shows the state correctly. Click it to toggle. It has clear label and tooltip text as well in case the ugly icons aren't clear enough. Click the drop down arrow and you get an option to set it to true (enabled) or false (disabled). The drop down also has a link to navigate to SVG Basics and the SVG 1.1 specification.

Customizing
If you don't like having a toolbar with just the one button on it (and I don't), then you can right-click the default Firefox toolbar and choose "Customize..." You'll get a palette of toolbar buttons you can drag on to the default toolbar. One of them is added by this extension, it starts with the label "Built-in SVG" but that changes to reflect the state of the preference. Drag the button to the toolbar of your choice and click "Done." After that, right-click the default Firefox toolbar and uncheck the SVG Prefs Toolbar toolbar to hide it.

Regular use
When svg.enabled is false, Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1.1 won't try to render SVG content. This means embedded SVG tags as well as SVG documents referenced by the <object> or <embed> tags. If you're already on a page that uses SVG, you'll have to refresh or reload (press F5 or Contrl-R in Windows) to see the effect.

If you have another way to render SVG (that would be Adobe SVG Viewer or another plugin installed), then the plugin will get a chance to render the SVG. A plugin will only work for SVG included as a document. This means you can view pages that use the <object> or <embed> tags to include SVG documents. Inline SVG can't be rendered by a plugin. To see compound documents like those, you can use the built-in rendering. I'd expect that for now, I'll normally be using ASV and in time I'll be using the built-in rendering a lot more. Hopefully this extension will be totally useless soon :) .

You will need a plug-in to render SVG when svg.enabled is set to false.

How I made it
I work in a total vacuum and all the knowledge just sprang into my head spontaneously. Okay, maybe that happened right after I read the excellent tutorial on how to make a Firefox extension over at Born Geek.

I used the same structure described there, starting out by building the Google Toolbar Lite extension with a batch file and 7zip. Then I replaced all the parts that needed replacing and removed all the parts that needed removing. I made my really ugly button icons in the Gimp and I edit my source with Textpad.

With 7 zip, I had to set the file type (zip, as opposed to 7zip, gzip or others) and I also told it to use no compression, though I'm not sure if I could have let it compress just a little. Here's my build batch file, with no error handling.

You can have a look inside my XPI to see how I did it by just unzipping it all and opening it in a text editor. Both the XPI and the JAR inside the XPI can be opened by 7zip, Winzip or lots of other tools.

Extension Reference Material
I found a lot of good references while working on this. Most of them I've already called out, but XULPlanet has a lot of good reference material. I also had a quick look at the source code where the preference is used in Firefox.

Why I Made This
I explained this yesterday, but I know I might not come across very clearly. As much as I like Firefox, I'm trying to promote SVG. SVG is more than a feature of Firefox.

For Developers
To encourage SVG developers to support the widest audience, I thought it would be nice to be able to quickly test on ASV and Firefox. Adobe SVG Viewer will generally look the same on Internet Explorer as it does on Firefox, so I think of this as a nice shortcut.

For Surfers that are Early Adopters
As a user, I'd like things to just work. If I have to go toggle a setting in about:config then I might do it once and forget about it. If there's some set up work but then just a simple button to click to see if a site will work, I'll do that.

For Me
I like the idea of being able to customize Firefox and I'd read about XUL here and there, so it was nice to finally have a really really simple project to play with. Who knows, maybe I can add tools to it later to do something more useful. Really, any boolean user preference could easily be controlled with an extension just like this. If you want to, go ahead. Just tell me about it, I'd like to hear.