Mozilla's Servo Made Several Advancements This Summer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's Servo Made Several Advancements This Summer

Mozilla had several student developers contributing to their next-gen Servo engine via this year's Google Summer of Code. Overall the work appears to be a big success and boost for Servo...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Servo-GSoC-2017

[uid313]

The Servo project is very interesting. I very much look forward to Firefox 57 which seems like it will be really great.

However, with WebExtensions the UI of the extensions all look vastly different. They basically get a HTML page and they all code it from scratch and it looks different with their own style sheets.
It would be cool if web browsers provided a common style sheet for all WebExtensions extensions.

[ssokolow]

The Servo project is very interesting. I very much look forward to Firefox 57 which seems like it will be really great.

However, with WebExtensions the UI of the extensions all look vastly different. They basically get a HTML page and they all code it from scratch and it looks different with their own style sheets.
It would be cool if web browsers provided a common style sheet for all WebExtensions extensions.

Already thought of on the Mozilla side.

There's a browser_style boolean you can set in the browser_action, page_action, sidebar_action, and options_ui sections of your extension manifest to include just such a stylesheet. While they're still working on the docs for it, you can see a reference for most of the elements and CSS classes in the UI components section of the old Firefox Style Guide page.

[KellyClowers]

"Custom Elements" eh? Does that mean we can make it a XUL parser?

[vurpo]

Custom elements are a HTML feature. I don't know what XUL looks like, but if you can write XUL using a set of custom-defined HTML tags, then any modern browser can parse and render XUL.

[andrei_me]

Made by Mozilla. The standard browser of Linux.

Such wow.

#IfYouKnowWhatIMean

[uid313]

Chrome and Firefox both support WebExtensions.
But why are Chrome extensions with the .crx file extension, while Firefox use the .xpi file extension?
Aren't these compatible?

[tg--]

Chrome and Firefox both support WebExtensions.
But why are Chrome extensions with the .crx file extension, while Firefox use the .xpi file extension?
Aren't these compatible?

They are not.
XPI is a _very_ old format, I think it existed before Firefox became to be known as Firefox.
It basically is a standard zip file with a install manifest and the needed files in it.

CRX files were invented by Google for Chrome many many years later. It's basically also a zip file, but includes a special header for signatures, versions and other metadata.

Both essentially do exactly the same, with the difference, that XPI uses a XML manifest that is extensible, and CRX its custom header which is pretty static (but can be enhanced by further fields, which is not downwards-compatible if they chose to do so at some point).
An advantage of CRX would be, that it doesn't need an XML parser and the signature can be checked more quickly. The downside is, that it needs special software to read an write the header.

[uid313]

They are not.
XPI is a _very_ old format, I think it existed before Firefox became to be known as Firefox.
It basically is a standard zip file with a install manifest and the needed files in it.

CRX files were invented by Google for Chrome many many years later. It's basically also a zip file, but includes a special header for signatures, versions and other metadata.

Both essentially do exactly the same, with the difference, that XPI uses a XML manifest that is extensible, and CRX its custom header which is pretty static (but can be enhanced by further fields, which is not downwards-compatible if they chose to do so at some point).
An advantage of CRX would be, that it doesn't need an XML parser and the signature can be checked more quickly. The downside is, that it needs special software to read an write the header.

So with making extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you can't distribute one file?
You have to pack it into a different file for each browser?

[starshipeleven]

So with making extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you can't distribute one file?
You have to pack it into a different file for each browser?

Firefox can handle CRX too https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1260836

No idea about Edge (and I don't even care).