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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."

2 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?

  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.