Question

Recently I have been experimenting with Firebreath and developed a plugin in order to showcase my c++ projects on my portfolio website. I would like to make it easy for users to look at the projects without downloading files if they are new on my website.

The only issue I have at this point is that when users visit my page, they will receive a message indicating the plugin is missing. I would like to have an option for the users to automatically install my plugin without having to manually download and run it.

The plugin is mainly targetted at Windows users, since the applications are as well. I intend to support Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer. Currently I am using a MSI installer to install the plugin.

I have found a question similar to this, but I still needed to save the MSI installer and run it.

My question is: What would be the best way to implement this?

Answer 1

There isn’t any way to “automatically” do what you want to do. The closest that I have heard of would be to use a java applet that would download and install the plugin for them. This can be pretty reliable on Mac but far less reliable on windows (for a number of reasons, among which the fact that many windows users don’t have java installed and that Chrome blocks java applets by default without intervention by the user).

Other options include:

• Creating a CAB file installer (only works on IE)
• Creating a XPI firefox extension that packages the plugin (requires restarting the browser, only works on firefox)
• Creating a CRX chrome extension that packages the plugin (only works on Chrome)
• Microsoft ClickOnce used to work pretty well for one click installs of MSI files from a web page, but recently I think it doesn’t work on many (if any) browsers; haven’t seen it used in awhile, anyway.

There is no “automatic” way to install plugins; that would be considered a severe security issue. This is probably the #1 reason that plugins are as uncommon as they are.