Thursday, December 04, 2008

Firefox Woes

I intended to write about this in April 2009 but I soon forgot about it. Well, today the problem showed up once more so let's get this one out of the way.

A plugin for web browser is a program that can communicate with a web browser and make the browser do additional things that a browser usually cannot do. For example, browsers cannot play videos on its own. That's why we need to install Flash plugin to play a Youtube video.

A scriptable plugin for a web browser is a special kind of plugin: we can write JavaScript codes to program how the plugin should behave. Internet Explorer browser and Firefox browser provides different mechanism for us to crate a scriptable plugin. In this post, I will consider only the Firefox mechanism because this post has the title "Firefox Woes".

Mozilla provides a number of ways to write scriptable plugins. One of them is the NPAPI. Ignoring that the documentation provided is confusing, there is one particular NPAPI bug that is annoying enough for me to want to write this post: the unsigned integer bug in NPAPI.

What could they have been thinking?

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