Something really cool happened this week. I will let the tweets to take over.
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1297860114066546688
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1297934921562914818
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1297946991599656961
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1297964496275648512
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1298150900033150976
https://twitter.com/tecoholic/status/1298598910164791298
… and that’s how I made it to the homepage of TheNextWeb.
… and Lifehacker
https://twitter.com/lifehacker/status/1298976636054966272
Source code of the extension: https://github.com/tecoholic/Just-Arrived
For Chrome: Chrome Webstore
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/just-arrived-ff/
What did I learn from this?
The most important thing I learnt while doing this is probably the fact that the extension architecture is standardised across Chrome and Firefox. Thanks to Shrinivasan for asking me to port it to Firefox.
But, I think the relationship is one sided. Firefox can work with extensions written for Chrome, but Chrome won’t work with extensions written for Firefox. This is due to the nature of Firefox’s API and the fallback it offers.
For example, the storage api on Firefox is storage.* whereas on Chrome it is chrome.storage.*. Since Firefox has fallbacks for all the chrome.* API, the code primarily written for Chrome works without modifications on Firefox. But if a developer writes the plugin first for Firefox, it would lose the namespacing and therefore won’t work.
More technical details here at MDN web docs: Building a cross-browser extension
Special thanks @tshrinivasan for pushing me to build it for Firefox to @SuryaCEG for the UX advised and @IndianIdle for writing the article.