

Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer? Because your competitors won't - bdfh42
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/firefox_to_ie_port/

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es
Is it just me or "IE evangelist" sounds a bit strange? :)

Hm... this article does not make sense.

First they say

 _Firefox users are more likely to "mess" with your business model. "They tend
to install things like ad blockers, whereas the Internet Explorer user is more
mainstream."_

Then they actually want IE users to start using custom plugins too.

Working as a web developer I have to deal with IE6 bugs almost on a daily
basis. Sometimes I imagine how much time is spent on this. If we could use it
on different purpose we could write a new browser with complete standards
compliance.

~~~
volida
What part exactly confused you? Your write-up is really confusing.

~~~
es
I wanted to say that Firefox users _"mess with your business model"_ because
they have plugins for that. If you will give IE users a set of plugins to
choose from, the most popular will be AdBlock. So main benefit they are
referring to will be gone.

Sorry if my English is a bit confusing, it's not my first language.

~~~
volida
Ok, I get it now.

Because you included this "They tend to install things like ad blockers,
whereas the Internet Explorer user is more mainstream."

I exclude the possibility you implying what you actually meant, because that
phrase says IE users are mainstream therefore they don't care installing ad
blocks etc.

Therefore the assumption was that you implied, that wanting IE users is
meaningless which contradicts what the phrase says, which didn't make up.

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etal
Because your competitors won't -- that's exactly the reason _not_ to spend a
major chunk of your time in a porting effort. Some history springs to mind
involving IBM, Lotus and, indeed, Microsoft.

Unless IE-Firefox seamlessness is the original point of your extension, this
compatibility is almost certainly not a hair-on-fire concern for your users.
Foxmarks shows a reasonable workaround: provide a website where you can reach
all your data in a pinch, and focus on usability and extended functionality
for the browser add-on.

~~~
volida
On the contrary, my mind brings me to the "blue ocean" concept.

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llimllib
> "[Writing an IE plugin using CLR that actually works on most people's
> computers] is a little bit tricky," Allen said.

Ya think? I'd call that the understatement of the week.

~~~
cgranade
The version incompatibilities are a large part of why I respect Sun's
commitment to backward compatibility. Even when it means that I can't use
things like generics, that backwards compatibility also means that I can use
the same applet for almost all browsers made in the past 10 years. Of course,
you can't write a browser plugin in Java too easily...

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shimon
I was tech lead on a project that involved both Firefox and IE extension
development. We tried to keep the extensions very simple, so there would be as
little to port and keep synchronized between versions. Both platforms were
relatively new to us, but I don't think we were stupid.

The IE plugin was about 300 times more work. Seriously, people have asked me
about this a lot, and that's a pretty accurate judgment of the relative
workload.

Also, it's shockingly hard to find a competent COM+ developer, and the IE
extension docs are actually worse than the Firefox docs, though both leave a
lot to be desired.

In general, installing an extension is a pretty huge barrier; don't expect
users who aren't already familiar with your service to bother installing one
just to try it.

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liuliu
I don't know what the majority think, but I tend to ignore all IE plug-ins
because I am afraid that most of them may be virus and backdoors.To install
plug-ins on IE, you will see a strange warning on the top first and then click
many allow buttons to continue. For firefox, the install process seems safer.

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stcredzero
This is a piece of advice that falls into the category: "If everyone followed
these, they'd be worthless!"

Much like: "Don't vaccinate your child. Your kid can benefit from the herd
immunity with none of the risks!"

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danielh
"IE sucks, the users are dumb and the influencers use FF."

Not what I expected, maybe I should look up the definition of "evangelist".

~~~
volida
someone calling 70% of the users dumb makes him look dumber.

By the way don't put in tags something that wasn't said in the article. I even
went back to see how I missed reading that.

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zaatar
Some useful IE Addons resources:

<http://ieaddons.com/> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753587.aspx>

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jgrahamc
I'm surprised by the claim that writing an add-on for IE is harder than for
FireFox. My experience of Microsoft is that they do a good job of supporting
developers through examples and documentation, whereas Mozilla does a very
poor job.

~~~
jjs
Firefox plugins are easy to write if you know where to scrounge for
documentation. :P

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thingsilearned
Everyone I've talked to on this says the opposite. They say they spent 90% of
their time on IE and only got 5% of their users from it.

If its going to be viable MSFT needs to build an addons page.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think that largely depends on what type of website they are working on. I
think the majority of our clients' users are still on IE. 6. :(

