karlherrick.com

Changes to Exch

Tuesday, 09 August 2011

While Exch still continues to function properly, during Mozilla’s review process for the latest update, it was stalled (for good reason). For any future versions to be approved, code changes will be required.

The first issue has to do with respecting the JavaScript global namespace (which I didn’t when it was created, as was common practice at the time), and the other with features being deprecated (in favor of better approaches). From the email:

This version didn’t pass full review because of the following issues:

  1. In order to prevent conflicts with other add-ons that may be installed by users, you need to wrap your “loose” variables and functions within a JavaScript object. You can see examples on how to do this at the JavaScript Object Management tutorial.
  2. The codebase_principal_support preference and enablePrivilege function are considered unsafe to use and support for them will be removed from Firefox very soon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546866.

Exch was and still is a pretty cool extension, but its task is better served via sites like Yahoo! Finance, or Google Finance. Plus, with all of the cool things you can do with Google Search (as I have posted about before), or Yahoo having a slick currency conversion tool on their site, I feel I have run out of reasons to maintain it.

With all of that said, the last update will be exch-1.5.0-fx. While it -should- work with Firefox 4 and 5, let’s call it “beta”. A beta perpetually stuck at version 1.5.0. 😉


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