Windows DDE Shell Integration removal
Robert Strong
The Vista OS integration work uncovered a bug in our DDE Shell
Integration that also affected other versions of Windows though it did
so less often. Basically, because Firefox will perform a restart during
startup when it needs to register components, etc. a hack was added that
enabled DDE Shell Integration on startup and removed it on shutdown by
adding and removing the associated registry keys. This in turn causes
several bugs many of which occur inconsistently and hence probably have
never been submitted as bugs.
The affects of removing the DDE Shell Integration are that opening
protocols and file types that are handled by Firefox from outside of
Firefox and with Firefox already open will be slightly slower. During
normal operations on my system instead of taking around .5 seconds for
Firefox to become active it takes around .9 seconds. There are no
changes to how this is handled when Firefox is not already running and
the time will be the same.
The removal of the DDE Shell Integration will not remove the DDE code so
third party apps that use DDE to communicate with Firefox will not be
affected.
Please responds with any concerns to dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
Thanks,
Robert