Question

I’ve to create plugin or add-on for my official community site.
Requirement

1. There should be a button at browser, which should extend a form, which can add the current url as a bookmark with interaction from user with some more inputs, in turn that should be recorded into excel sheet in local drive. I’ve VBA code to extract data from the community url to excel sheet. Now, I’ve to create browser control to enable user direct url to fetch the data.

2. My control should be activated (i.e. toolbar button) based on url, so what should i create, a plugin or add-on ? i want my control not to affect browser performance or user experience.

3. Based on reply for 2, what tool should i use to create plugin/add-on which should be compatible across browsers ?

4. I’ve gone thro’ Fire-breath demo, code capability with Visual studio, which was nice, but still missing some knowledge about visual studio, what to package of visual studio install and what language to use, it would be better if it is Visual basic ?

5. At last, is it possible to place control (i.e. button) inside the webpage to activate my code, if so, which one is capable of doing it, add-on or plugin ? workflow in nutshell to achieve that…

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

First, a few things to understand:

1. A browser plugin is something that is instantiated in one of two ways:

   1. Injected into the DOM in an object or embed tag
   2. Instantiated by the browser to open a page with a specific mimetype

2. Browser plugins don’t know anything about the browser, the URL bar, the bookmarks, the context menus, browser dialogs, browser chrome, browser events, etc. Browser plugins only know anything about the current page. Browser plugins cannot change browser settings

3. Browser plugins are DLLs; they can’t easily be written in Visual Basic. While it might be possible, I’ve never seen one, and you’d have to learn a lot about NPAPI plugins before you could do that. You’d also probably have to write one for IE, one for IE, etc.

In other words, what you need is not a plugin. Firebreath is not going to help you much, if at all. Some extensions (also called add-ons) use a npapi plugin to provide functionality that they cannot do on their own. For more information see http://npapi.com/extensions

With that information, I recommend you think about it and create a new, more specific question for what you need to know next. I don’t know extensions, I do plugins. Actually, once you break down what you need to do into some smaller questions you’ll probably find others who have ask most of them and you can find the answers with simple searches. Your main problem is that you don’t yet understand the technologies you need to use. Hopefully this has helped.