Application Dev via Addons not as popular for Firefox - how come?

Add-ons addons.mozilla.org
#1

I was browsing github and came across this: https://github.com/trueinteractions/tint2

https://www.trueinteractions.com/tint2/docs/tutorial-gettingstarted.html

They basically did FFI via javascript. And html/css which allows people to write their own applications that work with the OS APIs.

We have js-ctypes and the html css etc etc, how come our application/addon development isn’t as hot? Our setup is so much easier, install firefox, and can run this code right out of the scratchpad. This guys requirements are nuts, get node then a bunch of dependencies, and it still may not work right, yet people are dev’ing for it much more then i see in js-ctypes for Firefox. (apps in Firefox are just addons with about: page or something [like that work offline too or something])

Looking at the issues page of this guy there are over 120 issues show its pretty popular: https://github.com/trueinteractions/tint2/issues

#2

Wow v8’s ffi is quite popular as well - https://github.com/node-ffi/node-ffi/wiki/Node-FFI-Tutorial - it is looked upon quite favorably and is quite popular.

js-ctypes is spidermonkey version, it would be would be nice see the same love to spidermonkey! Comparing the APIs ours is much nicer, techniques are more true to C. Also they are littered with strings. Only advantage they have is callbacks that are setup in an off-thread but are dispatched to main-thread are forwarded back to the off-thread. Firefox crashes :frowning: We need to patch this.

#3

My guess would be that it’s the NodeJS part that makes alternatives more popular. Most people already work with Node for webdev. Especially when you do Node server development, I imagine those skills transfer quit nicely. And all those libraries of course.

There are things brewing around Servo/Graphene/Browser.html though.

#4

The way I see it (and, quite frankly, the way I also use it currently) is that node is great for the backend (i. e. servers) whereas the Mozilla platform feels better in the frontend, connecting HTML with the broader world of the operating system.