New Alliance Hopes To Standardize Web Plug-Ins

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."

Comments

Where's MS

[breadiu]

Why are they scared of working towards a standardized future?

Re:Where's MS

[MikeDX]

Maybe they think a world dominated standard will be open to abuse and be more prone to attack from worms, backdoors, trojans, etc..

Re:Where's MS

[Daengbo]

A consortium like this normally doesn't happen with the big guy on the block. It's an attempt by the Davids to join together to fight Goliath. That's what these things are and what there're for.

Shockwave?

[Daengbo]

Maybe now there will finally be some of the missing plugins like Shockwave.
Not that I really want it, but my kids do.

If this is true

[dmomo]

I Hope that all browsers involved would allow me to point to my own plugin directory, so I don't have to have a different copy of the same file for each browser I use.

Re:If this is true

[tod_miller]

"What if he uses an inferior OS"

I prefer the term, 'differently advantaged' when talking about Windows, it is so less offensive :-) ;-)

Wow

[Gr8Apes]

If this could be completed quickly, this would be a huge boon to consumers everywhere, making life much simpler for Joe Sixpack. It would be another step in commoditizing the underlying OS, and the web browser in a sense as well, as you don't have to worry about plug in support as long as it was a compliant browser.

And with CERT saying ditch IE, there's no better time than today to have this type of action. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet....

Oh great!

[revery]

I think the internet's broken. That first link, heise online, it's in a whole other language.

I've already tried resetting the defaults on IE...

Can anyone help?

--

I uhm... write stuff, but not well, and not often

w3c?

[ols22]

Does anyone know how the w3c fits into this?

You know what this means, don't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, regardless of browser, everyone can have 10,372 smileys and valuable advertisements from Hotbar.

Oh no!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Don't reinvent Active-X with all its problems. Maybe browsers *don't* need standard, easy-to-install extensions (think BHO and ActiveX)

Re:Title Correction

[Red Alastor]

There is a difference between standardize and monopolize. You need to be alone to monopolize. Standards *are* good. As long as they are open and everybody can use them.

So Firefox is gonna change the plugin API again?

[Dr. Spork]

Grr! The transition from Firefox 0.8 to 0.9 was a big pain, as you had to wait for all the extensions to get repackaged before you could upgrade. It was a pretty big headache, because it wasn't clearly marked what works with 0.9 and what doesn't.

On the other hand, I expect that plugins will get even better once they have an audience beyond the standard Mozilla browsers. And I'm happy they're leaving out Microsoft. Let's finally put to rest that tired Internet Explorer!

A little like what we've had in the audio...

[Phil John]

...world for some time. There is a widely adopted "open" standard (VST-Virtual Studio Technology). They are not cross platform as they are native software, however I can load up one of a number of sequencers on Windows and use the same plugins.

There are competing plugin formats such as Direct X, but VST's seem to have the market pretty sewn up - there's even bindings for java :o)

One the mac side of things Apple introduced AudioUnits which seem to be gaining popularity.

The great thing is, since developers no longer have to target a certain platform (i.e. only one sequencer family) you see a huge wealth of plugins available to be used on anything - hopefully we'll see that same kind of developer community flourish around rich-content plugins for the web.

If only they'd go a bit further...

[Ma�djeurtam]

...and release the plug-ins themselves (hear Flash) under an open source license.

I'm not playing the open source fanatic here, but I'd really like them (*cough* macromedia *cough*) to realize that Linux is more than Red Hat.

Being a Gentoo PPC user, I still have no way to play flash on my iBook (well, I can boot it on OS X).

If really they want to protect their trade secrets (are there any? Isn't .swf more or less an open standard?), at least, could they release their plug-in for other archs?

Think about scumware NOW

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Whilst it's all very well for us "FireFox on Linux" users to gloat about our immunity from scumware; we must be aware that the developers of scumware only target IE _because_ it is the most prolific browser. The security weaknesses of IE are more likely the second reason.

Now if a critical mass of Internet users migrate to FF/Moz/Saf etc., scumware authors WILL target this shared extension architecture.

Now, it is all very well saying that the Mozilla platform may not allow drive-by installation (to the best of our knowledge); but remember that scumware is often installed through social engineering of the user. "This website requires Hyperviewing 3D Spatial Extension" (bundled with scumware for your convenience); and the user may click "Yes" to install without second thought.

How you go about allowing extension installation whilst maintaining a level of sanity needs carefull thought at this stage.

MS has already standardized a web plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

I call it a "virus".