Hacker News Reader

> 3. Forked Code. There should be no reason to do it

The actual problem is that some APIs are different, for example, in Chrome the notifications has a richer set of options but you need to be careful to not use the ones not supported by Firefox.

> Keep the same manifest

Actually, it depends on which options you use, for example, i18n placeholders aren't supported in Firefox while they are in Chrome, in Edge, the manifest is drastically different.

View on HN

I think an analogy everybody would understand is to think of a regular web app. If you need to add Internet Explorer support to a website that only supports Chrome, does it make sense to fork the website? Almost never. You just inline hardcoded elements and style stuff that only IE browsers understand masquerading as html comments so that other browsers will ignore it. At most, maybe you run/serve a platform specific piece of js/css/html.

Maintaining hundreds of lines of duplicate code can become a logistical mess. Most extensions will see 95-100% shared code between platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com