If you are in the business of writing components/plugins that work inside browsers and even if your target audience is Windows users, you can't ignore Firefox anymore.
IE is still the most popular browser by far but Firefox is a force to reckon with when it comes to writing browser plugins.
If you use Visual studio as a development environment and want to develop plugins for Firefox here are a few points to get you started.
First checkout the article OpenGL sample as Firefox plugin on code project. It is a great and simple example on how to write a Firefox plugin.
Second, because some things have changed since the above article was written, follow the steps below to get the Firefox plugin project to work on Visual Studio:
1. Download the Firefox source code version you want
Example: the Firefox 3.0.1 version is found here
2. Extract to yourroot\mozilla
Example C:\Projects\XProj\mozila
3. Download the Gecko SDK/ XULRunner SDK source code version you want
Example: the Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3.0) version is found here
4. Extract to yourroot\xulrunner-sdk(for Firefox version 3.0) or yourroot\gecko-sdk(for Firefox version 1.5-2.0)
Example C:\Projects\XProj\xulrunner-sdk
5. Run unix2dos on npbasic.dsp and npbasic.dsw (you can find them at yourroot\mozilla\modules\plugin\tools\sdk\samples\basic\windows)
6. Open the npbasic Visual Studio project (you can find it at yourroot\mozilla\modules\plugin\tools\sdk\samples\basic\windows)
7. Inside Visual Studio go to project properties and set the additional include directories:
For Firefox 1.5-2 (gecko-sdk) change to->
yourroot\gecko-sdk\include; yourroot\mozilla\modules\plugin\tools\sdk\samples\include
For Firefox 3 (xulrunner-sdk) change to ->
yourroot\xulrunner-sdk\sdk\include; yourroot\mozilla\modules\plugin\tools\sdk\samples\include
8. Fix a compilation bug in npplat.h:
When building the project you might receive the following error:
error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before
identifier 'ContextRecord'
The error can be fixed by changing the order of some of the include files inside npplat.h.
The following 2 include lines are found in npplat.h:
#include "npapi.h"
#include "npupp.h"
You will need to move them from the beginning of the npplat.h to a place beyond where the Windows include files are included.
For Example if the original file looks like this:
...
#ifndef _NPPLAT_H_
#define _NPPLAT_H_
#include "npapi.h"
#include "npupp.h"
/**************************************************/
/* Windows */
/**************************************************/
#ifdef XP_WIN
#include "windows.h"
#endif //XP_WIN
...
The modified file should look like this:
...
#ifndef _NPPLAT_H_
#define _NPPLAT_H_
/**************************************************/
/* Windows */
/**************************************************/
#ifdef XP_WIN
#include "windows.h"
#endif //XP_WIN
#include "npapi.h"
#include "npupp.h"
.....
9. Rebuild the project.
10. You should be good to go now. Good luck!
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