Michael Davidson wrote:
- As for persistence beyond browser lifetime, I understand the
reticence. However, similar problems have been solved in the past.
Flash asks the user for access to hardware like cameras. Surely being
able to take pictures of users is as scary as running code after the
browser has closed.
I don't think it is, no. Taking a picture is a one-time activity; the
user knows exactly what he's getting into. And once the picture is
taken, no more picture-taking until the user says so explicitly.
I, personally, would be hard-pressed to describe the
persistence-beyond-browser-lifetime issue to a typical user in a way
that would allow him to make an informed decision on it.
Heck, I would be hard-pressed to explain it via a browser dialog or the
like even to a very intelligent user who happens to not be intimately
familiar with the way their computer and the internet happen to work. I
could do it in 10-15 minutes of in-person conversation, probably. Or
several typed sheets of paper worth of text...
For browsers that do have extensions, having the
extension outlive the visible browser process doesn't seem like that
great a leap in functionality.
While this is true, extensions (at least in Firefox) are installed with
the following user-facing caveats:
1) You have to explicitly opt-in to the install source, unless it's
addons.mozilla.org.
2) You are told that extensions can do anything they want to.
Item 1 above is very important.
Note that you could write a Firefox extension that outlives the browser
today. Just include a binary component that starts a separate process.
Perhaps the install UI could look and feel more
like the UI for installing a native app?
Really, it sounds like you want something more akin to a Prism app [1]
than anything else. You don't _actually_ want to run gmail in a browser
window. You just want to deliver it over http:// and leverage a
browser-like thing on the other end for rendering it, right?
-Boris
[1] http://prism.mozilla.com/
