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Thank you for your work on Firefox. > This WebExtension API is much smaller, much better documented, and does not expose internals-only stuff. It also doesn't

by slrz 9y ago

Thank you for your work on Firefox. > This WebExtension API is much smaller, much better documented, and does not expose internals-only stuff. It also doesn't expose a lot of stuff that's useful and not tied to Firefox internals in any way. The browser is one of the most heavily used programs on people's computers. Integrating it with the rest of your system and workflow can have huge payoffs in user experience and productivity. The traditional XUL-based extension system, while not always pretty, allowed for that. WebExtensions are severely lacking here and some of that seems by design. As an example, I'm still trying to figure out a non-insane way to implement something akin to the It's All Text extension that allows editing text areas on websites using a proper text editor.

throwanem 9y ago
I tried that, too. There is no such method at this time that doesn't involve setting up something in between the browser and the editor to marshal between the browser's native messaging API [1] and the editor's desire to operate on text files. I don't think that's insane at all, but the complexity involved did exceed my frankly passing desire to get IAT back - I barely ever use it any more. It shouldn't take a reasonably experienced extension developer more than a day or so to implement, though, I would think. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na...
thristian 9y ago
As a fellow fan of It's All Text, I've looked into this a little bit, though I never got around to implementing anything. You're looking for the "Native Messaging" feature: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... I just checked the It's All Text github repo, and their suggested replacement is a thing called GhostText¹, which actually seems a good deal fancier that IAT ever was. ¹: https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText
- slrz 9y ago
  Looking at GhostText and its editor integration scripts, those basically work by running a websocket server on localhost. Implementing access controls seems to be left as an exercise for the reader. If I understand the native messaging API correctly, nothing in there requires the presence of any networking daemon. The browser just execs a program you can communicate with using JSON messages on stdin/stdout. That is already a lot better than I thought.

by slrz 9y ago

throwanem 9y ago

I tried that, too. There is no such method at this time that doesn't involve setting up something in between the browser and the editor to marshal between the browser's native messaging API [1] and the editor's desire to operate on text files. I don't think that's insane at all, but the complexity involved did exceed my frankly passing desire to get IAT back - I barely ever use it any more. It shouldn't take a reasonably experienced extension developer more than a day or so to implement, though, I would think. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na...

thristian 9y ago

As a fellow fan of It's All Text, I've looked into this a little bit, though I never got around to implementing anything. You're looking for the "Native Messaging" feature: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... I just checked the It's All Text github repo, and their suggested replacement is a thing called GhostText¹, which actually seems a good deal fancier that IAT ever was. ¹: https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText

slrz 9y ago
Looking at GhostText and its editor integration scripts, those basically work by running a websocket server on localhost. Implementing access controls seems to be left as an exercise for the reader. If I understand the native messaging API correctly, nothing in there requires the presence of any networking daemon. The browser just execs a program you can communicate with using JSON messages on stdin/stdout. That is already a lot better than I thought.