Re: NPAPI replacement for those of us who still need system API access

On 10/9/15 1:38 PM, Richard Bateman wrote:
> What is your strategy going forward with that?  Google has given us Native Messaging.  It's a terribly obnoxious API to deal with and extremely inefficient in a lot of ways, but it does provide us with a method of communicating with a native application.  Does FireFox have something similar? If not, do you plan to add something similar or at least something that could be used for a similar purpose by the time that NPAPI is deprecated?

The proposed solution is to create a Firefox extension that talks to 
native code. The APIs listed below are some options.

Mozilla really ought to create some example extensions demonstrating 
these approaches. They would be a good starting place for developers 
wanting to port their NPAPI plugin to an extension.

* child_process API

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Low-Level_APIs/system_child_process

* ctypes

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/js-ctypes

* WebUSB API (available on Firefox OS, but not yet available to desktop 
extensions)

http://reillyeon.github.io/webusb/
https://github.com/alexsalas/WebUSB