ColonelPanic

Overloaded terms One of the least understood concepts in the Browser Plugin world is — browser plugins.  What they are, and even more: what they are not.  Probably at least once a week I answer a question somewhere on a forum or on the comments on this blog and say “You can’t do that with [...]

Most who are deep in the plugin world already know this, but I will repeat it quickly for those who only dabble: Firefox 3.6 has removed support for XPCOM plugins. This means that if you use XPCOM for your javascript interface (i.e. you have an IDL file on your npapi plugin, you us nsScriptablePeer, etc) [...]

The Problem: I’ll be up-front about something here; I don’t particularly like ActiveX.  I understand a lot of the reasons for creating it, and I won’t go so far as to claim that it shouldn’t exist or anything like that; in fact, it does very well for certain types of things.  The main thing I [...]

Introduction Ever since I started this series of posts on NPAPI and plugins, I have started receiving occasional emails requesting additional help with aspects of NPAPI that are particularly confusing.  With full-time work, FireBreath development, and a 6 month old baby to take care of, I often don’t have as much time as I’d like [...]

While I’m not ready to release a “beta” version of Firebreath yet, we are getting really close. In fact, it’s close enough that anyone feeling a little adventuresome shouldn’t have any trouble setting up a test plugin and testing the limits. We only support Windows so far (sorry guys, it’s the platform I know best, and it’s the one my client needed first), but we support both Internet Explorer and NPAPI (Firefox, probably Chrome and Safari as well).

A brief list of supported features:

Call for help I hereby issue a “Call for Plugin Developers” to the readers of the site. I know we are as of yet few, but I hope that some of you may be willing to help me. I am quickly realizing that I need a plugin project from which I can quote source code; [...]

Note: if you haven’t already, please read up on FireBreath, the open source cross-platform plugin framework, and consider contributing. Previous posts The purpose of this post is to cover the basics of providing an interface by which javascript can interface with an NPAPI plugin in a cross platform manner.  The primary focus of this post [...]

Note: if you haven’t already, please read up on FireBreath, the open source cross-platform plugin framework, and consider contributing. Recap Last time, I talked about the fundamentals of implementing a NPAPI plugin.  Today, I’m going to go into a little more detail on how to use the strange callback architecture that firefox exposes. The NPAPI [...]

Note: if you haven’t already, please read up on FireBreath, the open source cross-platform plugin framework, and consider contributing. Introduction I have now been researching and working on a cross-platform browser plugin for several months.  By far my greatest frustration throughout this process has been the significant lack of documentation on the subject.  So, with [...]

Note: if you haven’t already, please read up on FireBreath, the open source cross-platform plugin framework, and consider contributing. Update Last time, in Detecting the version of an ActiveX IE Browser plugin part one, I discussed the ToString() method of an ActiveX object, and how it is called when an ActiveX object is instantiated from [...]