Add-ons using the techniques described in this document are considered a legacy technology in Firefox. Don't use these techniques to develop new add-ons. Use WebExtensions instead. If you maintain an add-on which uses the techniques described here, consider migrating it to use WebExtensions.
From Firefox 53 onwards, no new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
From Firefox 57 onwards, WebExtensions will be the only supported extension type, and Firefox will not load other types.
Even before Firefox 57, changes coming up in the Firefox platform will break many legacy extensions. These changes include multiprocess Firefox (e10s), sandboxing, and multiple content processes. Legacy extensions that are affected by these changes should migrate to WebExtensions if they can. See the "Compatibility Milestones" document for more.
A wiki page containing resources, migration paths, office hours, and more, is available to help developers transition to the new technologies.
Unstable
Data encoding and decoding using Base64 algorithms.
var base64 = require("sdk/base64");
var encodedData = base64.encode("Hello, World");
var decodedData = base64.decode(encodedData);
Globals
Functions
encode(data, charset)
Creates a base-64 encoded ASCII string from a string of binary data.
Parameters
data : string
The data to encode
charset : string
The charset of the string to encode (optional). The only accepted value is "utf-8". In order to encode and decode Unicode strings, the charset parameter needs to be set:
var base64 = require("sdk/base64");
var encodedData = base64.encode(unicodeString, "utf-8");
Returns
string : The encoded string
decode(data, charset)
Decodes a string of data which has been encoded using base-64 encoding.
Parameters
data : string
The encoded data
charset : string
The charset of the string to encode (optional). The only accepted value is "utf-8". In order to encode and decode Unicode strings, the charset parameter needs to be set:
var base64 = require("sdk/base64");
var decodedData = base64.decode(encodedData, "utf-8");
Returns
string : The decoded string