Web protocol handler in FF3

This is one awesome thing to happen. Haven't you crunched your face in disappointment and frustration whenever you clicked a "mailto" link on a webpage and unnecessarily have your desktop mail application (mostly unused and not configured one) popping up, hogging quite a bit of resources? The worst case scenario would be, the above described things happening even when you are logged into one of your web based mail services and thats where you wanted to send an email from.

Now all that go away. You Gmail might just give you a new mail compose page when you click on a mailto link. And this is not just for the "mailto" link. There can be web based protocol handlers to any sort of protocol. So all in all FF3 will rock like anything along with making web applications rock harder. So folks be ready to dance for the beat, for the beat will be pretty high paced. :-)

More details here: mfinkle's blog.

JS-CTYPES Status

Mark Finkles Weblog » JS-CTYPES Status

This was what mfinkle recently talked about js-ctypes. As he said because of the hectic FF3 schedule the devs at mozilla were pretty busy and hence nothing could be done. I being a lazy bot, also did not do anything. In the blog post above, Mark talks about the struct support (which I told that I would be doing). Now I exhibited my initial enthusiasm by writing up a doc, which was not really useful (its here ). After that nothing much happened except for a small bug fix.

Now that mfinkle has rekindled the interest I will also try and contribute. The struct support is still pending and I will start getting XPCOM code exchanging struct information with libffi. After that we can look at the other interface of JS exchanging structs with XPCOM to finally complete the loop. In the mean time I am also looking at embedding mozilla. Will put up a post about that very soon.


Again, Get ready to use deadly binaries in your JS code. JS-ctypes is soon going to be here.. ;-)