On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Raymond Yee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Has anyone given thought to how hard it would be to port Firefox extensions
> such as LibX and Zotero to Chrome or Safari? (Am I the only one finding
> Firefox to be very slow compared to Chrome?)
We have ported LibX to Chrome, see http://libx.org/releases/gc/
Put briefly, Chrome provides an extension API that is entirely
JavaScript/HTML based. As such, existing libraries such as jQuery can
be used to implement the extensions' user interface (such as LibX's
search box, implemented as a browser action). Unlike Firefox, no
coding in a special-purpose user interface markup language such as XUL
is required. (That said, it's possible to achieve the same in Firefox,
and in fact we're now using the same HTML/JS code in Firefox, reducing
the XUL-specific to a minimum). Safari will use the same approach.
Chrome also supports content scripts that interact with the page a
user is looking at. These scripts live in an environment that is
similar to the environment seen by client-side code coming from the
origin. In this sense, it's very similar to how Firefox works with its
sandboxes, with the exception mentioned in my previous email that all
communication outside has to be done via message passing (sending
JSON-encoded objects back and forth).
- Godmar
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