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New Alliance Hopes To Standardize Web Plug-Ins

Posted by timothy on from the chatzilla-everywhere dept.

mksolutions writes "As reported on heise online and mozilla.org 'Apple, Macromedia, Opera and Sun Microsystems join in push to modernize plugins and create a richer web experience.' They are to develop a common, cross-platform plug-in interface which will be used in Mozilla products as well as Opera and Safari and will be released under an open source license."

12 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Shockwave? by cronot · · Score: 2, Informative

    Unless your kids are using Linux, the Shockwave plugin can be found here (Access this link with a Mozilla-compatible browser).

    Anyway, there's no indication that this "consortium" would set a standard for plugins in that they would be cross-platform. That would be the ideal situation, otherwise it would not bring many benefits to this effort.

  2. Plugin != extension. by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just in case you were confused, this is about things like the Macromedia Flash plugin that lets you view Flash docs, not the "Flash Click to Play" extension of Firefox. Granted, having one without the other seems insane, but this article is only about the one.

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    The enemies of Democracy are
  3. Plugger avoids plug-in hell! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is a Mozilla plug-in called Plugger which itself allows stand-alone programs to be used as plug-ins. This provides the desired feature of in-line viewing of formats not natively understood by Mozilla. But it also does another thing that other plug-in APIs misses, it seprates the stablity of the browser from the stablity of the Plugger'd viewer.

    The Netscape plug-in, IE ActiveX and IE BHO APIs all allow the plug-in to crash the browser! Even worse, these APIs make it trival for Spyware to collect information including online banking username/passwords.

    For the majority of plug-ins, all the plug-in functionality needed was a display system to provide their "window" in-line with the document. So, why then does plug-in APIs allow the program to run in-process with the browser?

    1. Re:Plugger avoids plug-in hell! by dmaxwell · · Score: 2, Informative

      Plugger is mainly for NS4 and hasn't been actively developed for a couple of years. Mozplugger is an actively maintained fork for gecko browswers.

    2. Re:Plugger avoids plug-in hell! by dmaxwell · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, I just looked at the Plugger page and they've just had a release after a long hiatus. The mozplugger devs say their next release will be based on it. Since mozplugger is just an apt-get away, I'll probably be staying with it.

      I'll also point out that plugger does a better job of being the Acrobat plugin than the Acrobat plugin. The downside is each PDF viewed causes acroread to be started again. It's stable though and lets me use gv or xpdf in Acrobat's place on my Powerbook.

  4. Re:Think about scumware NOW by RickHunter · · Score: 4, Informative

    Got news for you - scumware authors have already tried to target Firefox and Mozilla. The developers' reaction? Implement a "whitelist" system that only allows extensions to come from a small, fixed set of official servers.

  5. Re:Shockwave? by Pantheraleo2k3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't know about regular Wine, but CodeWeavers used to sell a product that has Wine-based Linux browser plugins for popular Linux browsers. Now it's integrated into CrossOver Office, as you see at:

    http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxoffic e/

  6. This could easily be made cross-platform... by david.given · · Score: 2, Informative
    ...by using a technology such as TenDRA: the plugins are distributed in a platform-neutral format, and then the final stage of compilation into fast, native machine code is done on installation. For the sandbox environment of a web browser, TenDRA's ability to define global interfaces would be a great help.

    Has anyone actually done anything useful with TenDRA yet? It seems like such a great idea, and yet there's so little interest...

  7. Re:Shockwave? by maxume · · Score: 2, Informative

    macromedia's page about it

    Mostly, flash started out closer to an image format than a 'rich client' and shockwave was supposed to be the rich client, but then flash got way popular and gained features, taking a big chunk of shockwave's market. Also, Flash-->flash, Director-->shockwave. Sort of anyway.

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    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  8. Re:Where's MS by StraightTalkExpress · · Score: 2, Informative

    So you're suggesting we dump html and move to flash? Ignore the open standard and move to something proprietary? I really don't think that's a good idea. There is a W3C standard for a Flash-alike: SVG. So far there's no full Free implementation yet.

  9. Yes! by warrax_666 · · Score: 2, Informative

    and no reasonable way to bookmark "pages" (state). That is the killer of Flash as far as I'm concerned.

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    1. Re:Yes! by Anonymous+Writer · · Score: 2, Informative

      Flash content also can't be searched using search engines either. I have found that to be really detrimental. Google can handle html, pdf, and doc file formats for searches, but not swf.

      If you post your entire website using flash, you won't be getting people who come across it through search engines. That's really important when you forget the domain name of a certain site with information that you want to revisit. I've never thought of flash as a good way for designing a website because of that reason specifically. You can forget how well your website ranks in search engine results because it won't show up at all.