taxilian

Worth reading up on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

actual plugins aren't useful for all situations; in fact, I'd say that it's relatively uncommon to need to write a plugin.

That is one of the main reasons I started FireBreath; relatively few people in the world know how to write a browser plugin for any platform, much less make one work on all major browsers. FireBreath aims to make that easier. That shouldn't preclude the fact that plugins simply aren't suited to many tasks; the need to install it is a big factor in that, particularly since most common install methods only work on one browser. Also, there are existing plugins such as flash and silverlight that already have a large install base and can often be used to solve many of the problems that people use plugins to solve; worth considering.

Also a great project; nixysa and FireBreath have a core difference in approach, though; nixysa is basically a code generation tool to simplify creating npapi plugins.

FireBreath is a framework that abstracts npapi and activex (but could be extended to abstract other types of browsers as well, if there were reason and someone wanted to) to make it easy to write your own code that works in both places.

When that comes out and works, it will be sweet... and FireBreath will support it.

- Taxilian (original author of FireBreath)

I'd say about 90% of the code can be cross platform; some things you'll have to implement seperately, such as the drawing library, since that doesn't work the same on each platform. FireBreath abstracts most of the differences, though. For example, it isn't a shim to let npapi plugins work on activex; it's a shim for both npapi and activex plugins, which means it's easier to write something in firebreath than it is to write it using npapi as well.

If you aren't doing any drawing, just network stuff and calculations, you can probably get by without writing any platform specific code.

- Taxilian (original author of FireBreath)