webapps team mailing list archive

[Alberto Mardegan <alberto.mardegan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all!
  Our unity-chromium-extensions is using the NPAPI which has been
deprecated last year and will soon stop working (updates will be blocked
already in May!)[0].

When planning for a replacement, I'd like we put some efforts in
integrating the Online Accounts experience as well, in order to minimize
the amount of extensions we produce.
For the record, the existing (but not used) Online Accounts extension is
here (both for Firefox and Chromium):
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~online-accounts/webaccounts-browser-extension/trunk/files

>From the Online Accounts POV, the required informations are: the domain,
the username (or anyway an identifier for the user, though we might even
do without it maybe) and the cookies.
The cookies can be obtained with a specific extension[1], and I believe
that they should be useful for the webapp story as well, if we manage to
reuse them the first time that the webapp is started.

My impression is that we should have an extension which is as slim as
possible: only captures the required information, and then delegates all
the work of setting up the webapp (and creating the online account) to
an external process. In this way we can hopefully share as much code as
possible with the Mozilla extension.
After a very quick glance at the options, I find the Native Messaging
extension [2] the most suitable for our needs, because my understanding
is that a NaCl would be confined, and it's not clear to me in which
ways. But that's just my first impression.

Anyway, I just wanted to get the topic started and see if we can bundle
the Online Accounts functionality in the webapps extension. :-)

Ciao,
  Alberto

[0]
http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/cookies
[2] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/messaging#native-messaging