[gopher] [Gopher Clients]: Chrome Extension

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > Realistically it should be rewritten anyway. There are now apparently ways
> > to get a raw TCP socket in Chrome with appropriate permissions, and that
> > would be much better than the hacky proxy forwarding method it uses now.
>
> This sounds like a really neat feature in Chrome, I assume Firefox
> extensions already have direct port access.  The networking part of the
> Firefox add-on was somewhat complex to read for a first time Firefox
> extension reader like myself.

Because of the way JavaScript reflection is done, you can do almost anything
in chrome JS that you can do in C++ in Firefox. Mozilla is exploiting this
property by moving potentially unsafe portions of code from C++ into JS so
that they then become subject to JS safety and security checks. The downside
is of course that all JS, even chrome JS, runs on the main thread and has
run-to-completion semantics. Multi-process Firefox is designed to eventually
improve this situation, though it will not do so immediately.

Chrome's extension model is substantially less advanced, but since chrome
is native instead of JS, it can put things on different threads for
responsiveness (same for WebKit).

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- And if I claim to be a wise man/it surely means that I don't know. -- Kansas