What are the differences between Google Chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons? - google-chrome-extension

I have been developing Chrome extensions and as I have already mentioned in a question on SO, I have problems paying that starting charge witch Google asks. So I quit wasting my time developing extensions for a company that has no respect for developers and I'm starting to develop Firefox add-ons. So I'm a total newbie in this area.
First of all I have to mention that I am NOT looking for an automatic functionality/way to convert them. I have noticed that one difference between Firefox add-ons and Chrome extensions is that there is not such a thing as popup.html in Firefox (maybe I'm wrong).
How can I find other main differences so that I can convert my extensions to Firefox add-on?

Firefox addons do have a popup paneil in their SDK available to use(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/modules/sdk/panel.html).
I'm developing a Firefox addon right now and I can tell you that their actual SDK and the develop environments are great, cfx to work offline or the online builder, both are powerful and easy.
Regarding the differences that you ask, besides a few structure differences and of course Chrome or Firefox specific code that is not going to work in the other platform, I think that it should be easy port an addon from one platform to another, no automatic but pretty straightforward.

Related

How else can I review the responsiveness of a local hosted app without using dev tools?

I'm working on an app on my machine and run it on local host. Sometimes browsers dev tools are not accurate and once I am making the changes in my code and then run, it doesn't look like how it was in dev tools. I'm talking about some alignment, responsiveness, not about styling, colors etc.
When I am comparing my app in different browsers it doesn't look the same in all of them, so I'm no sure which one is actually the accurate view.
I have tried Edge, Opera, Mozilla, Chrome. My company is monitoring my pc, so I can't install random stuff on it.
Is there any other option to preview accurately my app? Any extension or some site?
Thanks in advance.
You can always use other browsers like Opera which has developer mode, as well as, Microsoft Edge and Safari that offer web development tools. As for the alternatives for Firefox, I believe it was already answered, check this: What are the alternatives to the Firefox Developer Tools?
Moreover, these might not directly solve your problem but if you are looking for plugins or apps, check these useful tools out: Plunker, Percy, Ghost Inspector, Requestly.

What would be a minimum system/browsers version to run a simple website?

I got this job which I have to create a promotional website for a prefecture and they are asking me to list the minimum system requirements a user must fulfill to access this website. I am not sure on how to make this list. The website will have two versions: one very simple for older browsers and computers, and another one responsive. The idea is to maintain everything very simple, without any animation or something that would be difficult to run on older browsers.
What do you guys think would be a safe way to describe the minimum system/browsers version for using a website like this?
Thank you very much!
Most web development companies set a minimum level of browser support, not so much system specifications. My development company specifies the most recent two versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Chrome. If they need to support older browsers, I would set the minimum to IE8 and maybe 10 previous versions of FireFox, Chrome and Safari.
Also, you should use something like the HTML5 boilerplate and feature detection in the site. That way you can build one website that satisfies all of the requirements. Building two separate sites becomes a nightmare when it comes to future updates.

Chrome extension to change Desktop wallpaper

I'm diving into the world of Chrome Extension development, primarily because there is a very small feature that is missing in Chrome that I miss dearly. The context-menu option to "Set as background/wallpaper" like that found in Firefox. Sounds trivial, but it's convenient.
I have most of the "basic" stuff worked out with the manifest file, am able to install it, even managed to get it to show up as a context menu item.
The problem obviously is that I am wanting to mess with a user's OS-level settings which is extremely difficult because of security issues (fully understand this).
I found an extension that allowed this in older versions of Chrome, and it looked like the developer used some type of .dll and C++ to accomplish this.
I'm not really sure how to make this work.
Since that Chrome doesn't allow these kind of manipulations (such as your PC's settings), you will need to create a native application that will run beside your extension. When the user chooses the image from your extension and selects "use as wallpaper", you will use the native messaging API to send a message to your desktop application, that will set the wallpaper (and do whatever else you can't do within a chrome extension) for you.
You can use the chrome.wallpaper app api to set the wallpaper after using the messaging api to send the image from your extension.

(webrtc) chrome with mozilla not connecting please any idea how to do it

I use (https://github.com/webRTC/webrtc.io-demo) and can't connect different browsers mozilla with mozilla working good, chrome with chrome working good, but chrome with mozilla not connecting please any idea how to do it
The project on GitHub does not look very active (the latest commits are about one year old).
Considering that webRTC is still developing, it would be surprising if there were not issues at all.
I'd recommend you to use another (more recent) webRTC demo, for example one of the demos provided by easyRTC: https://github.com/priologic/easyrtc
Furthermore, it is typically not possible to access the web cam with two browsers in parallel (just in case you are testing only using one machine).

Browser addon development

Are there any good websites for instructing how to write browser addon for IE, firefox, chrome and Safari?
Not sure whether writing there is some frameworks which can be used to write addon for all major browsers such that one sourcecode for all major browsers.
Thanks.
IE and Firefox have very different plug-in models. IE supports binary helper objects (your native code running in IE's processes). Here’s how you can build one: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/04/04/designing-for-add-on-performance.aspx,
here’s why you should spend as little of your users’ time as possible in your code: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/23/updates-to-add-on-performance-advisor.aspx

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