Extensions will need to implement WebExtension parts for in-line preferences in TB 59

[Mark Banner]

Just a heads up to folks for TB 59, which I believe will be the next ESR.

Firefox has removed support for legacy add-ons to implement in-line
preferences in the Add-on Manager UI.

To maintain the ability to have preferences you'll need to write an
embedded WebExtension
<https://developer.mozilla.org/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Embedded_WebExtensions>
to go inside your legacy add-on. More details on the options_ui here
<https://developer.mozilla.org/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/options_ui>.

You'll also need to remove the old options definitions from install.rdf
so that the add-on will install correctly (otherwise Thunderbird reports
it is "corrupt").

Unfortunately, this can't easily be tested in TB 59 at the moment due to
bug 1418914 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418914>.
Hopefully that can be resolved soon.

Mark.

[Tito]

Many thanks Mark,

at the end, one clear statement like here is what needs to be done in
order to be able to have a addon in the future.


Do I understand that correctly that Web-Extentions will be the next
addon technology for the Thunderbird?

I have a question however that is related to what will be the
replacement of xpcom. I have been playing with WebAssembly, cmake
Emscripten and c++ in the last couple of weeks and i was impressed of
what could be do with it, however when i thought , cool lets try to load
the module Thunderbird I found that in Thunderbird the namespace
"WebAssembly.Module" is simply missing. Do you know if the council is
thinking about such replacements. What i mean is that to me that seems
to be the obvious choice, however since i do not know how much
development work needs to be put in before enabling such features, i ma
asking if someone was already thinking about it before.

any comment is really appreciated.

Tito

[Tito]

Many thanks Mark,

at the end, one clear statement like here is what needs to be done in
order to be able to have a addon in the future.


Do I understand that correctly that Web-Extentions will be the next
addon technology for the Thunderbird?

I have a question however that is related to what will be the
replacement of xpcom. I have been playing with WebAssembly, cmake
Emscripten and c++ in the last couple of weeks and i was impressed of
what could be do with it, however when i thought , cool lets try to load
the module Thunderbird I found that in Thunderbird the namespace
"WebAssembly.Module" is simply missing. Do you know if the council is
thinking about such replacements. What i mean is that to me that seems
to be the obvious choice, however since i do not know how much
development work needs to be put in before enabling such features, i ma
asking if someone was already thinking about it before.

any comment is really appreciated.

Tito



On 20.11.2017 09:26, Mark Banner wrote:

[Mark Banner]

On 20/11/2017 15:42, Tito wrote:
> Many thanks Mark,
>
> at the end, one clear statement like here is what needs to be done in
> order to be able to have a addon in the future.
>
>
> Do I understand that correctly that Web-Extentions will be the next
> addon technology for the Thunderbird?

I'm not involved with the council/architecture planning so I don't know
if the intention will be full WebExtensions or not.

As of the current Daily builds, it needs to be at least be a hybrid if
you want to use the inline preferences - due to the Gecko changes.
That's what I am highlighting here.

> I have a question however that is related to what will be the
> replacement of xpcom. I have been playing with WebAssembly, cmake
> Emscripten and c++ in the last couple of weeks and i was impressed of
> what could be do with it, however when i thought , cool lets try to load
> the module Thunderbird I found that in Thunderbird the namespace
> "WebAssembly.Module" is simply missing. Do you know if the council is
> thinking about such replacements. What i mean is that to me that seems
> to be the obvious choice, however since i do not know how much
> development work needs to be put in before enabling such features, i ma
> asking if someone was already thinking about it before.

Again I don't know the intentions here. I suspect a lot of it is
figuring out what hasn't been ported from Firefox - possibly as simple
as packaging a couple of extra libraries, but maybe there's much more
work. The cost/gain is also likely to come into play here.

Mark.

[Onno Ekker]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Mark Banner <mba...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 20/11/2017 15:42, Tito wrote:
>

>> Many thanks Mark,
>>
>> at the end, one clear statement like here is what needs to be done in
>> order to be able to have a addon in the future.
>>
>>
>> Do I understand that correctly that Web-Extentions will be the next
>> addon technology for the Thunderbird?
>>

> I'm not involved with the council/architecture planning so I don't know if
> the intention will be full WebExtensions or not.
>
> As of the current Daily builds, it needs to be at least be a hybrid if you
> want to use the inline preferences - due to the Gecko changes. That's what
> I am highlighting here.
>

> I have a question however that is related to what will be the
>> replacement of xpcom. I have been playing with WebAssembly, cmake
>> Emscripten and c++ in the last couple of weeks and i was impressed of
>> what could be do with it, however when i thought , cool lets try to load
>> the module Thunderbird I found that in Thunderbird the namespace
>> "WebAssembly.Module" is simply missing. Do you know if the council is
>> thinking about such replacements. What i mean is that to me that seems
>> to be the obvious choice, however since i do not know how much
>> development work needs to be put in before enabling such features, i ma
>> asking if someone was already thinking about it before.
>>

> Again I don't know the intentions here. I suspect a lot of it is figuring
> out what hasn't been ported from Firefox - possibly as simple as packaging
> a couple of extra libraries, but maybe there's much more work. The
> cost/gain is also likely to come into play here.
>
>
> Mark.
>

Are there any (Firefox?) add-ons that have already implemented this? I
don't get too much wiser from the documents, except from adding the
em:hasEmbeddedWebExtension tag to the install.rdf. How the embedded
webextension should be initialized and called from the legacy add-on is
still unclear to me…

Onno

[Mark Banner]

On 21/11/2017 08:41, Onno Ekker wrote:

> Are there any (Firefox?) add-ons that have already implemented this? I
> don't get too much wiser from the documents, except from adding the
> em:hasEmbeddedWebExtension tag to the install.rdf. How the embedded
> webextension should be initialized and called from the legacy add-on is
> still unclear to me…

I suspect there's not many around now, although some of the system
add-ons are. I've created a WIP for conversations here:

https://github.com/Standard8/thunderbird-conversations/commit/bed5b4ad7fc968d3115fcccf5a1ab4cfeaf1cae5

It creates the WebExtension & initialises it, there's a experimental
item displayed in the inline preferences, but that isn't hooked up to
the main preferences. There are ways to do it via messaging, I've just
not had time to look into them yet:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Embedded_WebExtensions#Exchanging_messages


Note the delayed startup: This is necessary to avoid impacting startup
time too much.


There's one example in-tree:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensions/screenshots
- this is a system add-on that manages Firefox's new screenshots feature.

Mark.