Douglas Ward's dashboard

Again, I appreciate your response. Over the years, SIMBL and APE have been controversial in the Mac community, so I've avoided installing them. But I do use a product called 1Password from Agile Web Solutions that has a similar InputManager-based extension, and it usually works well - at least until Apple upgrades Safari and breaks it. In the worst-case scenario, an out-of-sync InputManager extension can cause Safari to crash at launch, but lately the IM developers are doing a better job of checking Safari's version and unloading gracefully if the versions are incompatible.

I see some recent reports of the MIME-association problems you mentioned for WebKit plug-ins, but all of the popular plug-ins for things like Flash and Silverlight still seem to work for their MIME types. And it's my impression that WebKit plugins can interact with JS to modify the DOM for things like web content overlays, but I don't know enough about the Azigo reminder window to know if that is the right way.

A friend who is developing a Cocoa app with embedded WebViews mentioned recently that there was a problem for developers where extensions failed to load or execute in debug mode, and the solution was to turn off debugging.

Of course, the typical Safari user doesn't care about the details of the internal plumbing. We just want to use our preferred browser with systems like Azigo. The suggestion to "upgrade to Firefox" doesn't sit well with many of us. Obviously, it's an attempt to spin the problem. Instead, the developers can upgrade their Apple developer account and work with their engineers to find a proper long-term solution. In this case, it is a justifiable expense.

The bottom line is that Azigo has to work with Safari, or it will fail to become the industry's preferred identity solution. I'll sign off for now, with the hope that Azigo will be working on Safari in the near future. Thanks again for listening.

Hi Brian -

I'm still puzzled about this. Maybe I'm wrong, but everything I see from Apple and WebKit indicates that plug-ins have been supported in Safari for years.

I went to Apple's Sample Code section and found several examples of WebKit plug-ins. I built one of the examples - WebKitPluginWithSimpleGUI - that was released a couple of years ago. It was originally designed for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger SDK, so I made a trivial adjustment to the build settings to get it to compile in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It took about five minutes to download it, compile it and test it. It seems to work as advertised. As far as I can tell, it should be relatively simple to open a reminder window without dependence on any third-party components.

Is it still Azigo's position that Safari does not support plug-in architecture?

thanks,
Doug – Douglas Ward, on September 16, 2009 19:15

Hi Brian - thanks for your prompt response.

Apple claims that Safari does support a plug-in architecture. I haven't tried to create one myself, but it looks fairly easy, so I may give it a go as a proof-of-concept.

Looking in my /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ directory, I see all sorts of things that look like Safari plug-ins: Flash Player, QuickTime, Silverlight, Flip4Mac, etc. They all seem to work in Safari, and some of them were installed from third-party packages.

According to this developer page at Apple, last updated in February, Safari does support a plugin architecture -

https://developer.apple.com/mac/libra...

The topic contains the following articles:

“About Web Browser Plug-ins” describes the benefits of web browser plug-ins and how they are integrated into common browsers. It also discusses the advantages of disadvantages of both plug-in models, and how to deploy plug-ins on computers and web sites.

“Creating Plug-ins with Cocoa and WebKit ” describes how to use the WebKit-based plug-in architecture to develop and deploy web browser plug-ins for Safari and WebKit-based applications.

“Creating Plug-ins with the Netscape API” describes how to use the Netscape plug-in architecture to develop and deploy web browser plug-ins across multiple browsers and platforms.

Also, webkit.org - the foundation of Safari, Google Chrome and other browsers, mentions support for plug-ins. – Douglas Ward, on September 14, 2009 17:02