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I am no coder so pardon my naive question.

Is it possible for chrome and safari extensions to be interoperable, especially as they both have the same underlying web-kit technology? Surely, we do not want another platform fragmentation and battle. I am sure developers would love do no more work than recompiling the extension they built for Chrome. It will be a win for everyone.

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There is no technical reason why this couldn't work, but my guess is that abstraction libraries will be necessary because Apple and Google won't be able to a agree on a common API. I kinda agree because having to standardise HTML, CSS and JS is hard enough and the browser makers don't wanna open up another battle front. Also, being able to tailor the API tightly to the underlying browser will attract developers and therefore enable more competition.

Good times for add-on developers!

In the same vein of commonJS, they should get together and create commonXT

Nope, different interfaces to the underlying webkit functionality. And they're packed up differently.

I suppose the core functionality of more advanced extensions could be shared, with only different interface glue, but with simple ones, it won't be worth the bother to try to share.

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