Hi again, thanks a lot for your reply!
> Not really. Back in the days, the Mozilla suite supported dynamically switch > profiles in the middle of running and had a profile service which did the > dirty work. The "new toolkit" used by Firefox and Thunderbird (and now all > applications) does not support this mode and has removed that profile service. > > There is a little replacement that allows advanced users to select a profile > at startup, but this is not available during normal runtime. Great! I understand. I remember this old profile behaviour from the time when I used the Netscape Communicator. Phew, if this is still in MFCEmbed, that proggie is really ancient... . > XULRunner is the Mozilla runtime packaged up without the Firefox frontend. > It can be used to run XUL applications as well as for embedding. > > The XULRunner package itself contains only the runtime: it doesn't contain > headers or link libraries needed to *create* a XUL/embedding application. > These headers and link libraries are contained in the XULRunner SDK package. I have seen that you can download an already compiled version of that XULrunner SDK from the the Mozilla FTP. But I was wondering how you would actually run your embedded application, once you have compiled it. Cos I had the impression that in order to run an app, you need also the folders with the chrome and components around. E.g. I could only run MfcEmbed, after copying it ot the dist\bin folder which contains folders like "chrome", "components", "defaults", etc. I did not see that in the packaged binaries of the XULrunner SDK. They needed at runtime, aren't they? > Well, that depends on what you mean by "embed". Support for extensions is > currently limited to apps which use the "XRE_main" API to start the > application, which is typically XUL applications. This is because getting > extensions registered properly sometimes requires that the process be > restarted. > > You haven't really stated what you're actually trying to acheive with > embedding, so it's hard to answer the question. Do you really just want > webrunner or another minimal XUL application, or are you integrating with > some external technology? Ok, sorry for not being any clearer. What I plan to do is integrate a browsing solution into a C++ application that is neither MFC-based nor something where I can use ActiveX easily. It is an application that draws the UI using DirectX. I have taken a look at the Ubrowser, too. Basically I would like to integrate a browser which behaves like a firefox, i.e. a browser inside my C++ application that can as easily be extended by extensions (what a sentence!) as it is possible for Firefox. So ideally, I would like to have my compiled application with a browser inside and a folder "extensions" in which I put ordinary Firefox extensions. Do you think this is possible, or does it imply that I have to embed gecko and duplicate a lot of code that is in Firefox, in order to achieve this? I honestly have no clue about what XRE_main API is all about. Could you explain what you meant by "apps that use "XRE_Main" API to start the app"? Did you mean that extensions are only supported if my app uses XULrunner to start an "external" XUL application? This would not be embedded, but the XUL application would pop up outside of my C++ application, right? > Nobody is actively maintaining the embedding documentation; it is old and > outdated (as you have found out) and is very disorganized. I'd love for > somebody to step forward and organize it! Indeed, I have noticed :) Just one more question, you stated that XULrunner comes with the Firefox frontend, and I remember having read somewhere that "in the future", Firefox should not come as a standalone application anymore, but as a XUL application that is being run by XULrunner. The same was planned for Thunderbird and other projects, so that you only have one single runtime, i.e. XULrunner, and just start different applications on top of it. Is that already the case? Or is this still planned for the future? I mean, e.g. is Firefox 2.0.0.7 already done like that? Thanks a bunch! Florian _______________________________________________ dev-embedding mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-embedding
