Grokking the Lizard

So I spent most of my morning on Friday attempting to grok the state of Mozilla/Firebird/Gecko plugin development. Actually, I’ve come to realize that plugin is the wrong term: an extension is what I really want to build. It’s another of the Creative Commons tech challenges ; building a plugin/toolbar/extension for a web browser which either shows or changes when the page contains licensing meta-data.

After several hours of cursing at XUL, RDF and JavaScript, I have a prototype. OK, less than a prototype, but something: a toolbar button and status bar text that will display licensing RDF (if any) when clicked. It only works in Mozilla Firebird right now, but it seems to work equally well on all platforms. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to catch navigation events so that I can go about changing the icon, etc. Anybody, anybody?