It is good that we can avoid the crash. We do need to get some kind of syntax in the manifest.
- a On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Avi Drissman <[email protected]> wrote: > The crash is fixed. But the fact that we're now expecting random dll loads > to fail prevents us from giving good UI to users, and not labelling what > platforms it'll work on prevents us from warning in advance. > > Imagine a million angry Mac and Linux users filing bugs because their > favorite extension fails to fully load because it relies on an NPAPI plugin > not available on their platform. > > Avi > > On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Matt Perry <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Yeah, that's very bad. I knew the NPAPI syntax sucked, but we punted on it >> because we didn't like any of the alternatives. (Even if we do have a >> manifest syntax for it, the extension package becomes bloated with plugin >> binaries for other platforms.) But I didn't realize that it could cause a >> crash. I'll definitely have to figure something out soon. >> >> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Avi Drissman <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Andy sent me a CL for review about an extension crashing >>> (http://crbug.com/29584). Turns out the cause was a failure to load a >>> Windows .dll on the Mac. >>> >>> Huh? Then I went to look at the docs >>> (http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/npapi.html): >>> >>> { >>> "name": "My extension", >>> ... >>> "plugins": [ >>> { "path": "content_plugin.dll", "public": true }, >>> { "path": "extension_plugin.dll" } >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ], >>> ... >>> } >>> >>> Are you kidding me? How can we get away with not specifying what platform >>> the extension will run on? (Hint: we can't.) >>> >>> If we had something like: >>> >>> "plugins": { >>> "mac": ... >>> "win": ... >>> "linux": ... >>> } >>> >>> then at least we could warn on the extensions website that a given >>> extension is only compatible with a certain platform. On a load attempt we >>> could know that the extension requires a certain native library and fail to >>> load it with a real user-friendly warning. >>> >>> And developers could make extensions that are cross-platform compatible. >>> >>> Today? >>> - We can't tell in advance what platforms an extensions runs on, so we >>> can't warn the user (either on the extensions site or in the app) >>> - The developer has no way of creating a cross-platform extension. >>> >>> This is a really bad situation we've created. We need to get a new syntax >>> out for extensions to fix this, and soon, before world-breaking becomes >>> prohibitively expensive. >>> >>> Avi >>> >>> -- >>> Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] >>> View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: >>> http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev > > -- > Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] > View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: > http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -- Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev
