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I recently had to create an extension for as many browsers as I could, which ended up being Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The easiest - by far - of these platfor
by christiangenco 13y ago
I recently had to create an extension for as many browsers as I could, which ended up being Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The easiest - by far - of these platforms was Chrome.
The Safari distribution channel is a ghost town: http://extensions.apple.com/ http://extensions.apple.com/
Most Safari extension makers choose instead to just host the raw executable on their site, but that makes pushing updates a pain. See http://textbooksplease.com http://textbooksplease.com (visit in Safari).
Safari does, however, have a really nice extension builder which is useful if you don't know XML, I guess. And when you get down to the nuts and bolts (at least as far as I ventured), the Safari Extension API is pretty similar to Chrome's.
Firefox has been a royal pain. They have a "7-day review process" for all submitted extensions, and a tiered structure of reviews (preliminary and final) which translates to not being able to push updates for weeks at a time. Super frustrating when I can push changes to Chrome in about two minutes and know it will get pushed to everyone who already has it installed in a timely manner. I also found their API to be poorer documented than Chrome's.
I'm terrified of IE.
- CoryG89 13y agoI haven't tried it for any of the other browsers yet, however, I did give them all a look and this is how the current situation appeared to me as well.
- Afforess 13y agoI totally agree that Firefox extensions are a massive pain. I tried the review process and after the waits, and rejections, I gave up and hosted it myself. You can host Firefox extensions and have them auto-update, but it's not well documented on what magic settings you need to enable to do so. This tutorial was helpful: http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/automatic-firefox-extension-updates/ http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/automatic-firefox-extension-...
- byoogle 13y agoI maintain a library (a more comprehensive fork of AdBlock's porting library) that emulates most of the Chrome API in Safari: https://github.com/disconnectme/port https://github.com/disconnectme/port (we use this library for Disconnect). Now that Opera is based on Chromium, you can pretty easily develop an extension for three browsers with one code base.