Confused about require("chrome") support

Add-ons Development
#1

The following text can be found on this blog post concerning depricating XUL: The Future of Developin Firefox Add-Ons

We will also continue supporting SDK add-ons as long as they don’t use require(‘chrome’) or some of the low-level APIs that provide access to XUL elements.

However, I just installed the Firefox Nightly build and my test add-on seems to be working fine, although it uses require(‘chrome’).

Relevant code from the add-on:

var { Cc, Ci } = require("chrome");
var SearchService = Cc["@mozilla.org/browser/search-service;1"].getService(Ci.nsIBrowserSearchService);
SearchService.addEngineWithDetails('mysearch', 'icon', 'mysearchalias', 'my search description', 'get', 'http://stackoverflow.com/search?q={searchTerms}');
SearchService.currentEngine = SearchService.getEngineByName('mysearch');

Am I misunderstanding something? Will the support for require(‘chrome’) be dropped at a later time?

1 Like
#2

That’s not talking about e10s that’s talking about deprecating XUL, and almost deprecating the SDK, to switch over to WebExtensions. Yes require(“chrome”) will be dropped within the next 12-18 months.

#3

Is there a draft or something to know how to do things that we now do with require(“chrome”).

For example, I get and set advanced network settings in an addon. As far as I know the only way to do it now is with:

const {Cu} = require(‘chrome’);
Cu.import(“resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm”);
var prefService = Services.prefs;
…
…

Thanks

#4

Also, will submissions made to addons.mozilla.org in the next 6 months that use require(‘chrome’) be successfully approved and signed?

#5

I don’t think there’s anything like that now. As new APIs are added, they should be documented. At the moment the official doc is this wiki page.

1 Like
#6

Yes.

#7

Hi,

I am also now looking at rebuilding a firefox using the addons sdk.
The main purpose of the extensions is to read the http traffic for analytics purposes and translate it to a more user friendly manner in order to run our validation.

Any idea or suggestion on how to achieve it if the require(‘chrome’) will be deprecated?

Thanks

#8

If you use the WebExtensions API instead, you can use this:

(you will never see a response body, though)