Browser plugin development

[ArmchairAthlete]

Does anybody here know much about creating plugins/extensions for Firefox or IE?

Such as what languages can be used (guessing C++, especially for IE...), where to get tools, good sites to look at, sample code, etc. I'm not looking to do anything too complex.

 

[dighn]

for internet explorer, try searching for "browser helper object" and "tool band object" on google. the latter is for custom toolbars in IE while the former is for general non-visible plugins. all IE plugins are basically COM objects that expose the required interfaces, so C++ will work, so will C# and possibly VB.NET (i dont think regular VB works though) <--- edit: this is wrong

MSDN has some articles and sample code on those

not sure about Firefox though... i think it uses its own ui language or something..

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: dighn
for internet explorer, try searching for "browser helper object" and "tool band object" on google. the latter is for custom toolbars in IE while the former is for general non-visible plugins. all IE plugins are basically COM objects that expose the required interfaces, so C++ will work, so will C# and possibly VB.NET (i dont think regular VB works though)

MSDN has some articles and sample code on those

not sure about Firefox though... i think it uses its own ui language or something..

You can make ActiveX controls in VB 6 and C++. I don't think I've seen any IE controls that use .NET, however.

 

[ArmchairAthlete]

I guess I'd be learning C++ sooner or later as a CS major, so this gives me something to do. Not sure when C++ will be covered in class though (if ever). Too bad I can't use Java or Python.

There's a lot of Firefox fans here, still no info on FF extension development?

 

[dighn]

ignore my comment about pre.NET vb not being able to create these things... after some searching it seems that VB 6 can actually implement any arbitrary COM interface contrary to what I thought...

 

[noxxic]

FireFox extensions are just JavaScript. Then there's XUL for the GUI and RDF for the data/resources, both of which I'm not really familiar with but seems easy enough.

Here's some links:

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/
http://www.xulplanet.com/

For examples, just unzip the JARs or XPI of any extension. Unzipping the main stuff in the FireFox directory is also interesting to look at.

 

[CTho9305]

If you want to get into Firefox extensions, pick something simple on update.mozilla.org (idiocy level is a good place to start) and look at the code. It's quite easy to do. An XPI is just a renamed ZIP file, so you can open it with your usual ZIP software.