Posts with keyword: addoncon

5 entries

The Future of Browsers

Thu Dec 11 17:40:00 2008

The final session of the day is a panel on the future of the browser. On the panel are Joshua Allen of Microsoft, Mike Shaver of Mozilla, and Nick Baum of Google. Noticeably missing are Opera (excused due to distance) and Apple (absent without excuse). Douglas Crockford, of Javascript fame, is the moderator. Douglas asks is the add-on the best model for letting users solve their frustrations with the lack of capability in a browser. Joshua talks about Microsoft's goal to move toward extensibility through Web standards where ever possible and get away from native apps. Mike says that
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Multi-Platform Add-On Lessons Learned

Thu Dec 11 15:01:00 2008

Words of advice from the multi-platform add-on session at AddOnCon: Start from the beginning to support multiple browsers by not using features that are specific to one or the other. Keep things like XPath expression standard Test IE add-ons on Vista and IE8 first--especially if you're going to use an external process. Using an external process in IE can greatly increase testability Modularity and code portability The learning curve for IE add-on development is steep. Once you're on top, it flattens out and gets easier. Crashing the browser is easy in IE and the opportunity for conflicts is high
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Add-on and Mashup Development: Leveraging 3rd-Party APIs

Thu Dec 11 12:43:00 2008

An add-on in Firefox is Javascript, XUL, and CSS. Any part of the Firefox UI can be modified by an add-on. Version control is built-in as is an upgrade mechanism. Platform APIs allow an add-on to access anything on the machine. That's good and bad. There are security issues, but it makes add-ons very powerful because you have full access. One of the nice things about moving a mashup into an add-on is that you do away with many of the cross-site scripting restrictions that make mashups hard, or even difficult. Much of what you do
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Porting Add-ons from Firefox to IE

Thu Dec 11 12:16:00 2008

Joshua Allen of Microsoft is speaking about porting add-ons from Firefox to Internet Explorer. IE add-ons have been less popular for a few reasons: Building for IE is difficult Debugging tools are few and far between The best reason to target IE as well as Firefox is that the Web is about interoperability. The point of the Web is any use anywhere can get your stuff and use it. There's no competitive advantage to an add-on company to be in one browser. Being in as many browsers as possible is important. Joshua uses Oomph, microformats tool,
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Add On Business Models

Thu Dec 11 11:10:00 2008

The opening panel at Add On Con is made up of Kimbal Musk of OneRiot, Alec Jeong of CoolIris, Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue, Geoff Mack of Alexa James Joaquin of Foxmarks and Adam Boyden of Conduit. The participants had to introduce themselves with a haiku. That was pretty entertaining. Alexa arguably has the first and most well known business based on an add-on. The Alexa toolbar was made popular by webmasters who promoted the toolbar as a way of elevating their rankings. This was a double edged sword since it also muddied their data for a
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