Mozilla wants to run Chrome add-ons on Firefox

By admin On Aug 21, 2015

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Mozilla plans to run extensions for other browsers, such as Chrome, on Firefox. Developers of multi-browser plugins would thus have to spend less effort to maintain their software.

To accomplish this, Mozilla equips future Firefox versions with its implementation of the WebExtensions api. According to the open source organization, this largely corresponds to Google’s extension API for Blink, the rendering engine that Chrome and Opera use. This would make extensions easier to port. Mozilla is also in talks with other browser vendors, possibly including Microsoft, to set standards for plugins that can be used for multiple browsers.

The WebExtensions API relies heavily on another Mozilla project: Electrolysis. Thanks to Electrolysis, Firefox now runs single-page web-related content in a separate background process. That process in turn communicates with the regular Firefox process via various ipdl protocols. The advantage of this is that the website actually runs in a sandbox, which would be more secure. In addition, the browser is less likely to crash if a page freezes.

If you want to port extensions via the WebExtensions API from, for example, Chrome to Firefox, it is best to use Electrolysis for this, according to Mozilla. Mozilla advises developers to look into it soon. The technology appears for the first time on November 3 as standard in the beta version of Firefox 43. On December 15, every Firefox user who immediately updates his browser will have the Electrolysis technology. The technology is already in the current developer version.

Furthermore, Mozilla is taking a harder line against malicious extensions, the company emphasized earlier. This means, among other things, that add-ons that do not follow predefined rules will not work in Firefox by default. One of those rules is that the add-on must be signed and thus approved by Mozilla. Incidentally, Mozilla does say that extensions that support the WebExtensions API can be admitted faster.

Finally, Mozilla announces that it will say goodbye to certain techniques that have been part of Firefox for many years, in favor of the Servo browser engine, for example. The departure of one of those techniques, the XML User Interface Language, was announced earlier. In addition, the Xpcom and XBL support will disappear in due course. There is no exact date yet, but Mozilla thinks this will happen within 12 to 18 months.

Mozilla will face a challenge with the phasing out of the techniques. Many current add-ons will no longer work with only the current sdk and the WebExtensions api. “Over the next year, we will also seek feedback from the developer community. We will also continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much functionality as possible from most Firefox extensions.”