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Does this give Firefox a little breathing room from the coming Chrome onslaught? I've heard developing AddOns for Firefox is a real pain and that AddOns for Chr

Does this give Firefox a little breathing room from the coming Chrome onslaught? I've heard developing AddOns for Firefox is a real pain and that AddOns for Chrome are easy in comparison. That, plus Chrome's speed is supposed to really start eating into Firefox's user share.

rrhyne 17y ago
I've worked on addon's for both. Currently Chrome addons are incredibly easier to write, though they lack the api depth firefox exposes.
diN0bot 17y ago
i've only written extensions for FF. i love it!!! it was a bit overwhelming at first. i was still learning javascript, too. now i feel like a master. i'm an "abstraction/high level" kind of programmer (er, computer scientist)---you can tell because my biggest pride is that my code is organized very well, and adding features is a joy. by this i mean that understand extension-land and writing extensions isn't all that difficult or nittygritty. i look forward to writing extensions for chrome, of course, though the power of ff extensions is pretty d* satisfying.
ippisl 17y ago
i believe chrome and jetpack are quite the same in their simplicity. google even said that in the future they hope to make chrome and jetpack esxtensions compatible. regarding chrome's speed , firefox is starting to implement the multi-process browser ideas from chrome(a tab per process,a tab per extension) , with some of it is even in firefox 3.7 nightly build , which i feel is faster.
mmastrac 17y ago
Yeah on all counts IMHO. I'm currently developing both firefox and chrome extensions and there is an order of magnitude difference in effort and technical complexity between them. Jetpack is a great start for extension developers and it gives the FF team the ability to implement multiprocess browsing without breaking extensions left and right. As it stands now, FF is basically one big single threaded JS process (with other non scripting stuff delegated to other threads as possible). Small caveat: I am reasonably sure I understand how it works under the hood having worked so closely to it while writing extensions but I may have details wrong. I'm a Chrome fan and full time user, but I think Firefox will reign king over the modern browsers for a while. They need to break the single threaded JS loop, finish up the out of process plugin work and continue work on reducing the overall memory footprint of long-running Firefox sessions from buggy extensions and the complexity of working with long lived , fragmented heaps. Jetpack itself will help contribute to some of this. Firefox is still architected in places for machines of Y2K while Chrome had the advantage of assuming modern machines. I wouldn't count the Firefox team out at any rate. They make a lot of progress on platform and footprint every release.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  Are you saying that most of the Firefox codebase (with the exception of the JS engine) is written in JS? The DOM parsing?
  - mmastrac 17y ago
    Most of the core infrastructure (DOM, layout, etc) is C++. The UI is XUL (XML layout language) with much of the supporting UI logic written in JS.

rrhyne 17y ago

I've worked on addon's for both. Currently Chrome addons are incredibly easier to write, though they lack the api depth firefox exposes.

diN0bot 17y ago

i've only written extensions for FF. i love it!!! it was a bit overwhelming at first. i was still learning javascript, too. now i feel like a master. i'm an "abstraction/high level" kind of programmer (er, computer scientist)---you can tell because my biggest pride is that my code is organized very well, and adding features is a joy. by this i mean that understand extension-land and writing extensions isn't all that difficult or nittygritty. i look forward to writing extensions for chrome, of course, though the power of ff extensions is pretty d* satisfying.

ippisl 17y ago

i believe chrome and jetpack are quite the same in their simplicity. google even said that in the future they hope to make chrome and jetpack esxtensions compatible. regarding chrome's speed , firefox is starting to implement the multi-process browser ideas from chrome(a tab per process,a tab per extension) , with some of it is even in firefox 3.7 nightly build , which i feel is faster.

mmastrac 17y ago

Yeah on all counts IMHO. I'm currently developing both firefox and chrome extensions and there is an order of magnitude difference in effort and technical complexity between them. Jetpack is a great start for extension developers and it gives the FF team the ability to implement multiprocess browsing without breaking extensions left and right. As it stands now, FF is basically one big single threaded JS process (with other non scripting stuff delegated to other threads as possible). Small caveat: I am reasonably sure I understand how it works under the hood having worked so closely to it while writing extensions but I may have details wrong. I'm a Chrome fan and full time user, but I think Firefox will reign king over the modern browsers for a while. They need to break the single threaded JS loop, finish up the out of process plugin work and continue work on reducing the overall memory footprint of long-running Firefox sessions from buggy extensions and the complexity of working with long lived , fragmented heaps. Jetpack itself will help contribute to some of this. Firefox is still architected in places for machines of Y2K while Chrome had the advantage of assuming modern machines. I wouldn't count the Firefox team out at any rate. They make a lot of progress on platform and footprint every release.

euroclydon 17y ago
Are you saying that most of the Firefox codebase (with the exception of the JS engine) is written in JS? The DOM parsing?
- mmastrac 17y ago
  Most of the core infrastructure (DOM, layout, etc) is C++. The UI is XUL (XML layout language) with much of the supporting UI logic written in JS.