Re: Core API Proposal

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:

> Communication with native processes is indeed an important feature, and I
> agree that we should look at, but not necessarily copy, what google has
> been doing in this area, and compare that with alternative approaches.
>
> I suspect that the first iteration of a specification for extensions might
> skip this feature, and first focus on standardizing the core parts before
> turning to this kind of more complex (and probably more controversial,
> since there are several possible approaches) features.
>
> However, if people want to work on it from early on, I am certainly not
> going to stand in the way.
>
> It also depends on when browser vendors expect to be shipping this. The
> sooner they do, the earlier we should work on it.
>
> What do others think? Is this a topic to be explored ASAP, or to be
> deferred until we have stabilized the basics?
>

I agree that it seems unproductive to try to standardize this before the
building blocks that Mike outlined in the original email are in place
(kudos to the whole group for getting this process going btw).
However, we are actively working on native messaging for Firefox right
now.  The driving force is that many extension developers use NPAPI plugins
to spawn and communicate with native processes, and with the upcoming
removal of NPAPI we need to provide them an alternative.
The timing is unfortunate, and I'd like to bring this back to this group
eventually so we can talk about an inter-operable solution, but if we don't
deliver a solution soon, we'll be stranding a bunch of our existing
developers.
If you're interested in our efforts, you can follow along at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1190682

-Andrew