I have been tasked with developing a Firefox add-on that is capable of registering global keyboard shortcuts (ones that will work throughout all areas of Firefox) that will open up the side-bar and execute an XMLRPC request based on previously recorded input. The idea here is that there will be many potential XMLRPC requests that the user will want to execute via a keyboard shortcut.

Currently, the add-on is capable of handling pre-defined static keyboard shortcuts via the Firefox overlay. What I would like to achieve, is to allow the user to register their own dynamic custom keyboard shortcut.

There is an add-on that currently has some of this functionality, called Keyconfig. I'm not keen on having to ask users to install a second add-on to define their own shortcuts. It also seems that using the dynamic keyboard shortcut registration method in Keyconfig would require the user to close all Firefox windows before the dynamic shortcut is made available.

What I would like to know is:

• Is an XPCOM component the best way to register dynamic keyboard shortcuts from within a Firefox add-on?
• Is there a way to register the keyboard shortcut so that it is immediately available to all Firefox windows, without having to close the windows beforehand?