Yes, Finally, all browser will be chrome clones, just what we need...
Sad times indeed, when people celebrate mono-culture and the lack of options...
W3C is leading effort to kill the Open Web and everyone is just clapping long... EME, Browser Extensions, what will be the next thing W3C will sell to its google overlords?
This is wild overreaction. Google is by far the market leader, they pump out innovations in this space, and their decision to work with others mimicing its APIs so that browser extensions can have a level of cross-compatibility is is perfectly nice and pro-competition as you could possibly ask for. I guarantee you if Edge had such a flourishing browser extension marketplace Microsoft would do everything in its power to prevent the other browsers from allowing easy portability.
Pointing to another company and saying "Well they would be more evil" is not IMO a valid defense.
Just because Microsoft is more anti-competitive than Google does not change anything I said
Yet the actual effect is that the Firefox' browser extension marketplace is severely reduced (by their own descision, admittedly) while Chromes' stays the same for the time being.
Re:Browser Extensions Standard
by Manishearth on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @10:54AM
(#14901237)
I'm not very involved, but on top of the Chrome base API both Firefox and Edge have a bunch of additional APIs IIRC (I think Firefox supports all of the Chrome APIs but I'm not sure). The intent is to have the same manifest format so basic extensions work everywhere, but extensions can use browser-specific APIs that fit within the same general framework too.
> I think Firefox supports all of the Chrome APIs but I'm not sure
They support quite a few but not all. in addition there is a promise based version of each of the APIs that you can use in firefox under the browser namespace instead of the chrome namespace. (with a polyfill on npm too if you want that in chrome)
Right now you basically write your extension once (probably for Chrome), and then port it to the others, often with various small manual changes or workarounds for incompatibilities. It's much better than it used to be, but still pretty inconvenient and error prone.
I can see at least a couple of differences with current implementations though, like using the `browserext://` protocol instead of `moz-extension://` and `chrome-extension://`. Does anybody more involved with this have a summary of the differences between this spec and Firefox, Edge and Chrome's implementations?