my current work tasking requires creating a firefox plugin. I’ve done this relatively easily on Linux but porting to windows has exposed a peculiar problem. To do the port, I refactored the basic windows example given in the mozilla source tree. I did this operation slowly and methodically, testing as I went. Aside from the occasional OS dependent glitch everything seemed to be going fine until I finally changed the output name of the plugin dll. So, instead of creating a dll called npbasic.dll, the filename was fubar.dll. This immediately caused the plugin to stop working: it did not get picked up in Firefox about:plugins. Changing the filename back to npbasic.dll allowed the firefox plugin tab to “see” the plugin again.
Is anyone aware of an aspect of dll linking/functionality which could be causing this observed dependency?, any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Well, I’ve done some more research and it’s clear that my approach of painstakingly refactoring the example plugin was flawed, the best strategy is to use something like firebreath, as described here : How to write a C++ FireFox 3 plugin (not extension) on Windows?