444134 - Provide a way to work with MS-COM objects in chrome JavaScript, on Windows

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: XPConnect, enhancement)

Description

[snotling]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061015 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 

As an extension developer, I often want to take advantage of the native COM API on Windows, to access system services in particular (e.g. fax). Of course, there's always the possibility of running the Windows Script Host interpreter in another process... but that's far from perfect, in terms of input/output handling for instance.
 
Incidentally, there *already* exists support for such a feature in Mozilla source tree, under the name of "COM Connect/ IDispatch". It is/was developed (in part) for the ActiveX plugin feature if I'm not mistaken.

However, it doesn't work properly at the moment (on purpose I've been told).
1. The GeckoActiveXObject JavaScript object is not "visible" until a nsIActiveXSecurityPolicy implementation is provided, which used to be done by the "nsAxSecurityPolicy.js" file (see bug#203362, comment 10), missing in the distribution.
2. Even if GeckoActiveXObject was functional, it'd be exposed to all JS code, including HTML content. Whereas what I'd like is to use MS-COM in *chrome code only* -- thus shifting security issues to the developer.
3. Furthermore, AFAIK, this IDispatch feature is only built for Firefox, because of the ActiveX plugin reason. However using MS-COM objects is definitely useful in other applications (Thunderbird, XULRunner, etc). So I think this MS-COM feature should be included by default instead (toolkit?).

Reproducible: Always