Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer? Because your competitors won't | Hacker News Reader

Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer? Because your competitors won't

theregister.co.uk

22 pointsbdfh4219 comments

Is it just me or "IE evangelist" sounds a bit strange? :)

Hm... this article does not make sense.

First they say

Firefox users are more likely to "mess" with your business model. "They tend to install things like ad blockers, whereas the Internet Explorer user is more mainstream."

Then they actually want IE users to start using custom plugins too.

Working as a web developer I have to deal with IE6 bugs almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I imagine how much time is spent on this. If we could use it on different purpose we could write a new browser with complete standards compliance.

What part exactly confused you? Your write-up is really confusing.

I wanted to say that Firefox users "mess with your business model" because they have plugins for that. If you will give IE users a set of plugins to choose from, the most popular will be AdBlock. So main benefit they are referring to will be gone.

Sorry if my English is a bit confusing, it's not my first language.

Ok, I get it now.

Because you included this "They tend to install things like ad blockers, whereas the Internet Explorer user is more mainstream."

I exclude the possibility you implying what you actually meant, because that phrase says IE users are mainstream therefore they don't care installing ad blocks etc.

Therefore the assumption was that you implied, that wanting IE users is meaningless which contradicts what the phrase says, which didn't make up.

Because your competitors won't -- that's exactly the reason not to spend a major chunk of your time in a porting effort. Some history springs to mind involving IBM, Lotus and, indeed, Microsoft.

Unless IE-Firefox seamlessness is the original point of your extension, this compatibility is almost certainly not a hair-on-fire concern for your users. Foxmarks shows a reasonable workaround: provide a website where you can reach all your data in a pinch, and focus on usability and extended functionality for the browser add-on.

On the contrary, my mind brings me to the "blue ocean" concept.

> "[Writing an IE plugin using CLR that actually works on most people's computers] is a little bit tricky," Allen said.

Ya think? I'd call that the understatement of the week.

The version incompatibilities are a large part of why I respect Sun's commitment to backward compatibility. Even when it means that I can't use things like generics, that backwards compatibility also means that I can use the same applet for almost all browsers made in the past 10 years. Of course, you can't write a browser plugin in Java too easily...

It doesn't make sense to use CLR for a browser plug-in. It is a whole layer of abstraction you don't need. I've done this, using VC 6 and ATL as a way to implement COM interfaces.

I was tech lead on a project that involved both Firefox and IE extension development. We tried to keep the extensions very simple, so there would be as little to port and keep synchronized between versions. Both platforms were relatively new to us, but I don't think we were stupid.

The IE plugin was about 300 times more work. Seriously, people have asked me about this a lot, and that's a pretty accurate judgment of the relative workload.

Also, it's shockingly hard to find a competent COM+ developer, and the IE extension docs are actually worse than the Firefox docs, though both leave a lot to be desired.

In general, installing an extension is a pretty huge barrier; don't expect users who aren't already familiar with your service to bother installing one just to try it.

I don't know what the majority think, but I tend to ignore all IE plug-ins because I am afraid that most of them may be virus and backdoors.To install plug-ins on IE, you will see a strange warning on the top first and then click many allow buttons to continue. For firefox, the install process seems safer.

This is a piece of advice that falls into the category: "If everyone followed these, they'd be worthless!"

Much like: "Don't vaccinate your child. Your kid can benefit from the herd immunity with none of the risks!"

"IE sucks, the users are dumb and the influencers use FF."

Not what I expected, maybe I should look up the definition of "evangelist".

someone calling 70% of the users dumb makes him look dumber.

By the way don't put in tags something that wasn't said in the article. I even went back to see how I missed reading that.

Some useful IE Addons resources:

http://ieaddons.com/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753587.aspx

I'm surprised by the claim that writing an add-on for IE is harder than for FireFox. My experience of Microsoft is that they do a good job of supporting developers through examples and documentation, whereas Mozilla does a very poor job.

Firefox plugins are easy to write if you know where to scrounge for documentation. :P

Everyone I've talked to on this says the opposite. They say they spent 90% of their time on IE and only got 5% of their users from it.

If its going to be viable MSFT needs to build an addons page.

I think that largely depends on what type of website they are working on. I think the majority of our clients' users are still on IE. 6. :(

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