1321968 - Effect of mutiprocess FF and webextensions on IPDL and protocol handlers

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[PJAL]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161114215630

Steps to reproduce:

In lieu of the changes in FF I am researching my options to modify existing add-ons for the new platform.  

First, as I look through the online documentation I find many of the add-on pages marked as deprecated.  (This is a good thing) These same warnings are not displayed on the protocol document pages.  Still, knowing what is going away does not give me a warm feeling about the new platform not affecting how protocol handlers are implemented.  What I do not want is to go down a road that will be a dead end in another year or two maybe even sooner.  The new FF platform represents the 3rd major rewrite of customization since Liveconnect was abandoned.  After the last major change I evaluated chrome and almost moved all my custom extensions to this platform.  In retrospect I would be have saved myself another rewrite.  

My questions are these.
1) will the IPDL platform still exist for custom protocol development going forward?

2) When FF goes multiprocess where will the protocol handler reside? chrome?

3) Will it be necessary to use messaging for "chrome to content" communication?

Any additional information or suggestions are greatly appreciated.  I am sure there are many other developers who are interested in your reply

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Hi, please don't use bugzilla to ask open-ended questions, the addons development email list (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-addons) is an appropriate place for just discussions.
Nevertheless, with the transition to WebExtensions, extensions will not directly handle process-level IPC and will not (need to) have direct access to things like IPDL.
There is some work taking place on adding support implementing protocol handlers in WebExtensions, it is tracked in bug 1271553.