332851 - Too many plugin APIs to choose from

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Martin Husemann]

I'm trying to develop a new Firefox plugin. I started by reading the source, sample code and the developer.mozilla.org web site.

On the web site there are various APIs documented, the most prominent ones are 

 http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference

(incomplete, seems pretty close to the old Netscape API) and 

 http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Creating_XPCOM_Components

(complete, but resulting plugin just does not work)

After spending considerable time I more or less got a XPCOM component working and then went on to report the bugs in the sample code I found, only to notice bugzilla item #172180, which claims this API to be deprecated.

Would be nice to know in advance. I still don't know what API people are expected to use nowadays. Please, anyone tell me ;-)

Comment 1

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

You're supposed to use NPAPI (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference) with npruntime (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/npruntime.html) for scriptability. What made you think you should write XPCOM components to implement a plugin? If you can point to the docs that mention this, we'll get them fixed. Otherwise, this bug is  invalid.

Comment 2

[Martin Husemann]

Please feel free to close this bug. The current state of the web site is fine (from my POV).
Back then, when I started, ISTR that some parts of this were still "in transit" from devedge or temporarily unavailable, which probably caused big parts of my confusion. I then looked at the plugin samples and thought "4x-scriptable - that must be old stuff, I'll ignore that for now" and then found "simple" - which got me on the wrong track.

Comment 3

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

OK. There's another bug about dealing with http://mozilla.org/projects/plugins/, which IMO still needs some love.