Moving from xulrunner to firefox SDK

[Manish]

Hi,

I am working on a desktop application named "AZARDI" which is based on xulrunner. It is an offline ePub Reader for all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). You can check it out at http://azardi.infogridpacific.com/.

I have been deploying the application successfully with xulrunner 41 and earlier. Its been long since Xulrunner has been deprecated so now I am planning to deploy it with firefox-sdk. But the problem is from where can I find the latest firefox SDK version for all the platforms eg: windows, linux and mac. Second can the directory structure remains the same as earlier like for xulrunner.

Any help will be useful.

Thanks in advance.

[Myk Melez]

> Manish <mailto:manishj...@gmail.com>
> 2017 August 21 at 23:53

> from where can I find the latest firefox SDK version for all the
> platforms eg: windows, linux and mac. Second can the directory
> structure remains the same as earlier like for xulrunner.

There isn't a Firefox SDK, as Mozilla decided to stop supporting the
embedding use cases that were previously supported by XULRunner.

However, Firefox continues to ship a "private XULRunner" that other
applications can access via its --app command-line flag, which means
that you can run a XUL application on a system with Firefox via
/path/to/firefox --app /path/to/application.ini.

That also means that you could technically repurpose a Firefox
distribution to serve as your application's distribution by replacing
its application.ini and other application/branding files with your
application's files. The experimental qbrt project
<https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt> does this.

Note that these approaches aren't officially supported. However, the
--app flag has been present in Firefox for a long time, and I'm not
aware of any plans to remove it.

-myk

[Manish]

Thanks Myk

But I am bit confuse here. If we go by this way

/path/to/firefox --app /path/to/application.ini.

First there may be a possibility that Firefox is not installed and if it is installed and someone updates the firefox to latest version and the max ver. defined under application.ini is the older one, then the application won't start and will through the version mismatch alert.

Isn't there any method or terms defined where I can ship the firefox directory in the application folder rather than re-brading it or should we by default set the max version in application.ini to a higher value i.e 99 or if you can suggest any other way.

Also if we can ship firefox directory in the application folder "-app" thing will always work with the last firefox version supported.

Any help will be useful.

Thanks in advance.

Manish

[Myk Melez]

> Manish <mailto:manishj...@gmail.com>
> 2017 September 6 at 05:32

>
> Thanks Myk
>
> But I am bit confuse here. If we go by this way
>
> /path/to/firefox --app /path/to/application.ini.
>
> First there may be a possibility that Firefox is not installed and if
> it is installed and someone updates the firefox to latest version and
> the max ver. defined under application.ini is the older one, then the
> application won't start and will through the version mismatch alert.

Yes, these are all drawbacks to reusing an existing installation of
Firefox. In order to do so successfully, you would need to ensure that
your users install (and retain) Firefox and keep your application
up-to-date with new versions of the browser.

> Isn't there any method or terms defined where I can ship the firefox
> directory in the application folder rather than re-brading it or
> should we by default set the max version in application.ini to a
> higher value i.e 99 or if you can suggest any other way.

If you set the maxVersion value in application.ini to an unreleased
version of Firefox, such as 99, then you face the risk that your
application will break with a new version of Firefox that isn't
backward-compatible. A better option would be to test your application
with each new version of Firefox and then update its maxVersion value
accordingly.

However, the best option is perhaps to ship your application with its
own copy of Firefox, as you've suggested. Technically, it's possible to
do so. That's the idea behind the qbrt experiment
<https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt> that I previously mentioned. I'm
unfamiliar with the legal requirements for doing so, however.

-myk

[Manish]

Hi Myk,

Thanks for the response.

did you find any reference for legal requirements where it say that we can ship xulrunner application with its own copy of firefox.

I hope you have notice this too because if we launch the application with .bat script using firefox then under the task manager the application reference goes as "Firefox". I am not sure if we can do anything with that part also.

Appreciate any help or advise on this.

manish