Building Browser Plugins

You know those moments when you are asked to build something that just cannot be done from a web app?
Was asked how we could take a screen shot of a web page being viewed for annotation and review.

The good thing being, this is what browser add ons are for.

So I started with Chrome, being the browser most used after Internet Explorer.
Took a little bit but finally got everything sorted.
Was then able to take most of that knowledge and apply it to Firefox.
Safari was meant to look stupidly simple, but it took me a while to work out that plugins weren't being activated on files served from the file system. Had to set up a http server :/

You'll notice that I skipped IE even though it is the browser that sees the most use amongst the customers.
That's because it doesn't have an add on system like the other browsers do.
You have to build an add on that technically exists in the operating system and then targets the browser. I can't write javascript like I was for other browsers.

What did I take away from building the plugins?
Chrome was the favourite. Building the plugins was rather easy. There is a clear path for reloading the plugin and bundling it for delivery. Documentation was good.

Safari was the next easiest. Building the plugin was straight forward although I hated having the extra 'plugin builder' window open that is where I reloaded the plugin for. Filling out the details for the plugin via a UI is a very mac way of doing things. Documentation was a pain to navigate and sometimes missing some detail. Building the plugin for delivery was easy enough.

Which leaves Firefox near the bottom of the list. You have to disable some caching options so that it always picks up the latest version of the plugin you are building. You also have to open a new window every time you want to reload your plugin which for me meant restarting Firefox for every change. Documentation was excellent though. Building the plugin for deployment was a little trickier than the others.

At least I built add ons for those browsers. I just couldn't make it happen for IE.

Getting a grip on verbage.
I keep wanting to use the word plug-in.
Plugins are generally used for features like embedding the Flash player.
Extension was sometimes used for other things as well, like supporting different image/video formats.
Minor thing but annoying.