Cross-Product extension install improvements
Simon Paquet
As a regular user of extensions on Firefox or Thunderbird I cannot
overlook the huge usability differences between Firefox and all other
non-browser products when it comes to extension installation.
In Firefox you click on the download link, confirm your decision and the
extension will be installed (if it comes from a trusted source). Dead
simple. Even my mom could do that!
On other products like Thunderbird, you first have to download the
extension file to your hard disk, then you can either install the
extension by opening the extension/addons dialog and click on install or
you drag&drop the extension file into the open extensions/addons dialog.
My mom could *never* achieve this!
Not to speak about all the forum posts, newsgroup posts and bug reports
from people who
- erroneously install an extension into Firefox, which they would like to
install into Thunderbird or other non-browser applications
- get a dialog saying "your extension is not compatible with Firefox"
when they erroneously clicked on the download link in Firefox to
install the extension into Thunderbird or other non-browser
applications.
Especially the last one gets us a lot of bug reports and adverse comments
since the Lightning 0.3 release.
So are there any thoughts going into solving this problem for non-browser
applications? Is there a bug I can follow?
Simon
--
Sunbird/Lightning Website Maintainer:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Sunbird/Calendar blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
Joey Minta
> So are there any thoughts going into solving this problem for non-browser
> applications? Is there a bug I can follow?
I talked about this with a few people during my summer. A couple of
different options were proposed including sending non-firefox extensions
with a different mime-type, so Firefox's extension system wouldn't try
to install it. I imagine some thought has also been spent on this
problem in crafting Remora. At the very least, it's something that'd be
worth putting on the Firefox3 team's rader (if it isn't already there).
-Joey