Hi
I currently have a Firefox toolbar and am trying to figure out how to port it to IE. You can find a copy of my toolbar on www.prowebsurfer.com. It is written in JavaScript. I have done a lot of toolbar stuff with FF and several Ajax based web applications, how ever I do not know much about developing IE toolbar. I hired a contract programmer with IE extension experience, how ever I find it hard to believe IE works the way he says.
My basic firefox toolbar works as follows
- browser starts up
- browser calls my initialize code
- I use XMLHttpRequest() get back an XML config file stored on my web site. (www.prowebsurfer.com)
- I register an event handler for onWindowLoad.
- there are some other UI elements, however for the most part the core toolbar functionality runs with in my onWindowLoad() event handler.
- home page is loaded
I have packaged code so that I have a portable “core.js” and “FireFox.js” files. I have been able to demonstrate that my core works with IE. I create an HTML page with buttons that simulate my toolbar. The buttons on the page call the core.js function exactly the same way my Firefox toolbar does.
I was hoping the IE port would be easy. That is to say, create a UI using the microsoft API, and have the callback function call my "core.js" functions. The contract programmer says this approach will not work in IE. He has implemented the toolbar UI components in C++. He says our JavaScript code will have to be load each time the user enters a new URL into the browsers address bar. There are several problems
1) he claims our javascript code will be treated as if it originated from the same domain as the current URL. This will lead to a “cross domain security” violation when we try to use XMLHttpRequest() to load xml files from www.prowebsurfer.com.
2) our initialization code will run every time a new page is loaded. This would really slow things down
Is He correct
Can you suggest a work around or another approach
Thanks
Andy@prowebsurfer.com
trouble porting Firefox toolbar to IE
Fiddel