Mike Shaver, Director of Ecosystem Development, Mozilla Corporation
Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 9:30am - 9:45am
Location: California Ballroom B & C
TrackBack
The Mozilla family of applications provides an extraordinary degree of access to authors of extensions though an extremely powerful and flexible system of overlays and traditional "web-like" DOM and script techniques. With the right combination of creativity, experimentation, and acceptance of inter-version fragility, there are practically no limits on what an extension author can do.
That depth of integration, though, comes at the cost of much hand-wringing and late-night cursing for the developers of extensions and "host" applications alike. When nearly every aspect of UI and logic can be modified with new overlays, style rules, and crafty script hammering, how can the application ever evolve safely? How can extensions sanely support multiple versions, or even multiple types, of host applications? When an extension becomes a "must have" for your user base, and a desired application change would break it, how do you move forward?
This session discusses some of Mozilla's attempts, past and future, to address these issues and maintain the momentum of the extension-developer community.
