1169841 - Make it practical to developers work with E10S

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Anthony Lieuallen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150513174244

Steps to reproduce:

Bug 580850 kind-of-almost improves this situation, I've already complained there that it's not enough.

It's still *way too hard* to write an extension under e10s.  Case in point:

https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/issues/1955#issuecomment-106948745

After too much wasted time, I figured out that this particular bit of code might run in the parent, and might run in the child.  It usually runs in the child, so it was written to deal with that.  But it needs to instantiate an nsIFile (just so it can figure out the path ! ARGH!), so it passes through a (synchronous) call to the parent.

Oh, except in at least this one case it happens to run in the parent.  So trying to call the child message manager, the only way to go sync child->parent, fails with an oh-so-helpful `NS_ERROR_FAILURE`.

I shouldn't have to think about this so much!

Comment 1

[Giorgio Maone [:ma1]]

Anthony, as the author of NoScript and FlashGot I understand how you feel.

Most "simple" add-ons are already working or will soon work fine on e10s without modifications, if they use the SDK and its high-level APIs.
Unfortunately our kind of "low level" fairly complex add-ons, instead, still need to deal with the details of the message manager, which can be source of confusion and frustration.

The good news is that Mozilla has a whole team of smart and energetic people focused on improving add-on developers' quality of life, by both making the SDK more suitable for non-trivial use cases like ours and implementing new, friendlier APIs. I'm currently working close with this team to help myself and fellow add-on developers succeed in this transition phase.

Next time you're stuck with a problem like that, please feel free to contact me or post on https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-electrolysis : we'll try to find a solution together and possibly improve the APIs, the documentation or both.

Comment 2

[:shell escalante]

thanks Giorgio for responding and all the contributions you are making to improving the APIs.  Keeping bug open to check back on where we've gotten to after 51 Aurora (sept 12).  will update status and see if we can close.

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

With Firefox 57 only WebExtensions are permitted and are, by default, e10s compatible.