Chickenfoot scripts can be packaged as standalone Firefox extensions. With the click of a button, you can turn your script into an extension that others can install and use. This feature makes it simple to create a web prototype and share it with friends and colleagues.

New libraries bundled with Chickenfoot: Scriptaculous and Prototype. Prototype is “a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications,” and script.aculo.us is a powerful AJAX library that builds on top of it.

Users can define their own script templates. Suppose you want to use Prototype whenever you open a Chickenfoot edit buffer. Now you can create a template with the code include("prototype.js") and set it as your default template so every new buffer contains that code.

Basic table/row/cell patterns are supported. It is possible to locate tables, rows, and cells with the find() command: find("3rd table").find("2nd row").find("5th cell"). So far, we only support ordinals for identifying these elements — we plan to support table/row/cell as keyword patterns in the near future.

New “run selected text” feature lets you run part of a script. You can select any part of your script, right-click, and choose “Run selected” in order to execute it. This is handy if you only want to test a portion of your script.

Recognize “id” keyword pattern. As an alternative to document.getElementById("tableOfContents"), you can use find("tableOfContents id").element instead. Like other Chickenfoot commands, find() traverses subframes when looking for a match, so it can be more convenient than getElementById on sites with many frames, such as Gmail.

Stack traces are printed in the Output pane. When an error is thrown, its stack trace is printed along with the error message to help with debugging.

The core of Chickenfoot no longer requires Java. Previously, users needed the Java plugin for Firefox in order to run Chickenfoot. Now users only need Java if they want to use the extension creation tool or to take advantage of the ability to synchronize scripts with page loads on Microsoft Windows.