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May 19, 2004

Profile Components

Very very close to having profile extension components work in Firefox, as soon as I fix a nasty js crash on shutdown I'm going to check this in and people can start migrating their extensions over to the new 1.0 format.

Posted by ben at May 19, 2004 12:18 AM

Comments

Is there any chance to have this update system going public so localization projects would be able to setup mirrors of updates.mozilla.org ?

Posted by: Gandalf at May 19, 2004 10:33 PM

i've heard in the german firefox forum that firefox 0.9 will be released this monday. is it true?

Posted by: NoName at May 22, 2004 2:02 PM

i can't really imagine, because the theme-manager is still not ready, the same with extension-manager/-updater.

a suggestion: please stop giving us dates for new releases, they were always wrong until now, i think. copy the idea from opera: a release is shipped WIR - when it's ready ;-) not earlier, not later. that's just a shame for the firefox-project... i'm sure you've heard that already quite often, but nevertheless it's important i think.

Posted by: semoser at May 23, 2004 2:14 AM

@semoser, I'm sure Opera has those dates too ... they just don't make them public :) It's good to at least have a deadline, it helps to motivate.

Posted by: zulithe at May 23, 2004 12:11 PM

they never say dates, and i haven't found a system in their release-dates yet. and well, a deadline is ok, but as you see the deadlines are unrealistic, and i'm not sure if it helps to motivate if you have a deadline of which you know to be missed anyway...

Posted by: semoser at May 24, 2004 8:12 AM

I don't think 0.9 will be released this Monday.

According to the interview on Neowin, 0.9 will be released mid June.

Will have to wait patiently :)

Posted by: Aurum3 at May 27, 2004 7:18 PM

Why does the new extension manager voluntarily kill flexibility? Despite its limitations, XPInstall was a very powerful tool and even allowed customized package installation (eg. the Mnenhy installer just installs needed packages depending upon user selection) - all this will be gone.
Valid as the goal of automatic update and uninstallation may be, that's a very poor decision.
Why not provide a myInstallScript.js mechanism that allows for backward compatibility?
The current new EM is drastically hindering development of extensions whose complexity is above sliced bread. :(

Posted by: Karsten "Mnyromyr" Düsterloh at May 28, 2004 1:05 PM

How does the new system restrict functionality? Other than a couple of bugs for which there are known workarounds, the new system is far more flexible than that provided in 0.8.

The problem with the xpinstall system and why I want to discourage it is that it allows extension authors to do things that I don't want them to be doing - easily overwriting system files, throwing up nasty modal dialogs with poorly phrased questions. I know they can do as much of this as they want anyway once their extension is running, but I'd like to make them stop and think about it before they do it, and shutting down this functionality cleanly here is one way to do that.

Posted by: Ben at May 31, 2004 4:32 PM

> How does the new system restrict functionality?

In your spec at m.o, it says that install.js will not be called anymore. So the flexibility of writing custom install scripts is clearly gone...

I'll give an example of how the install.js way of things is useful:
Mnenhy consists of one main package and several subpackages and locales, all in one XPI. The install script takes parameters given via the URL when "calling" the XPI. These parameters (gathered by a special web page or by entering them along with the XPI's URI) define which subpackages shall be installed.
If you have 2 min to spare, please have at least a look at the introductory comments in http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/mnenhy/src/bin/install.js?rev=1.21&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

> throwing up nasty modal dialogs with poorly
> phrased questions.

Aw, really. I agree that these "OK/Cancel" dialogs are quite ugly, but that could have been fixed by providing means of custom dialog button texts. There was no need to beat XPInstall for addon authors' misbehaviour...

Posted by: Karsten "Mnyromyr" Düsterloh at June 2, 2004 6:03 PM

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