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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."

4 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. 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: 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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/