On 28/08/2015 17:37, sajolida wrote:
> In terms of extension code, Maone told us he would be busy with other
> extension work over the summer but maybe he's back on track now. Giorgio
> what's up? Do you have any ETA for a first prototype? Anything blocking you?
The main roadblock was Mozilla finalizing its add-ons migration strategy
to the Electrolysis (e10s) multi-process & sandboxing architecture.
Without an ultimate public decision, which has been deemed "imminent"
for all the past month (see
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8567#note-7 ), it was hard to even
decide which of the 4 different technical approaches to develop Firefox
add-ons was the best for this project:
1. XUL/XPCOM, like desktop NoScript;
2. restartless, like Android NoScript;
3. Add-on SDK;
4. WebExtensions, the new, future proof, Chromium-like thing (not even
disclosed yet until last week, but I was aware of it earlier because
I've been working closely with the e10s/add-ons team)
This finally happened last week, with this announcement:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/
More about WebExtensions:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ
As I told intrigeri when we met, I had really hoped to develop our
extension with the new API to improve its longevity and make a Chrome
porting easy to do and maintain, but unfortunately, as you can also
deduce from the links above, the decision have been dragged for so long
that we wouldn't be able to support the Tor Browser (based on ESR) for
about on year. Furthermore, until my own native.js proposal (
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/proposal-native-js-to-embrace-extend-the-webextensions-api/3457
) gets implemented (
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199718 -- filed just
minutes ago), the WebExtensions API is not powerful enough to support
our requirements.
Therefore the only currently available option ensuring longevity is the
Add-ons SDK (AKA "Jetpack").
I've just received guarantees from Mozilla (in a meeting held today)
that they will give us any assistance for our extensions to be supported
by any of the foreseeable future Firefox versions.
I've already set up a development environment and started hacking. I'm
gonna commit something to the git repository next week, and a working
prototype most likely by the end of September.
>
> Just to let you know, we want to do extensive user testing sessions of
> the whole process (Installation Assistant + Verification Extension) in
> November. So we need all the pieces to be ready by then.
I'm confident it's going to happen timely.
-- G
