HOWTO: Port Firefox extensions to IE

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By jstriegel
Posted 2007/06/08 @ 6:46 pm
Category Electronics

Hackszine reader Pete Warden is the author of a cool Firefox extension called PeteSearch. He wrote in to tell us about his progress with porting the functionality to IE:

PeteSearch is an extension that mashes up Google (and Ask, Technorati, Live and Exalead) search pages to give you hot-keys, dead-link checking and split-screen preview.

Now I’m trying the IE port, and I’ve my own HOWTO with sample code and articles on that painful process!

Building a browser object for IE is a much more laborious process than making a Firefox extension. Welcome to COM DLL hell. Thankfully, Pete’s done a nice job of documenting things while porting his app over, and it’s this sort of first-hand experience that makes it bearable to start a project like this of your own.

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6 Responses to HOWTO: Port Firefox extensions to IE

livebookmark.net on June 9th, 2007 at 1:27 am said:

oh my oh my. If I got it right from pete’s video, it visits all the links on the page to see they exits and the search term is inside.
Well, I find it a bit crazy. remembering the auto follow feature of firefox. it was really abusive. Imagine you do it for each link on google! what a waste of time.
btw, I guess google already shows you if the searchterm is there in the short description.
also I’ve check pete’s code, he uses a GET to check the result exits or not, not even a HEAD.
Real dissapointing.

beside finding him a bit narcissist, I really liked the split screen idea.

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petewarden on June 9th, 2007 at 9:03 am said:

Ouch, tell me how you really feel LiveBookMark.

I’m doing a GET because one of the my biggest time-wasters on obscure searches is pages that don’t have the keywords, either because of deliberate cloaking, or just changes since the pages were spidered. The extension checks the returned HTML to make sure it’s got the keywords. No images or other media are pulled.

Is that abusing the host’s resources? It’s something I’ve been wrestling with, and is a debate I’d like to have. It seems like the only way users are going to avoid having their time abused by black-hat SEO is some sort of mechanism like this. The current informal code of ethics seems to have been written for webmasters’ benefit, not users.

I’ll go into more detail, and cover the technical options (robots.txt, opt-in/out, agent detection) for dealing with this in a blog post.

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jason_striegel on June 9th, 2007 at 10:01 am said:

It’s only grabbing pages when you’re doing a search, so we’re not really talking of anything on the order of Firefox’s autofollow. Typically, you’re searching through the results anyway, so being able to verify what you are clicking on before downloading all the images on a page could actually be saving resources.

Maybe a on/off toggle would be nice, so that I could turn off the functionality easily without restarting Firefox. Usually, I’m happy without it, but when you’re searching for terms that are hard to find, this is a nice way of filtering out the non-relevant information.

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petewarden on June 9th, 2007 at 1:51 pm said:

There actually is an option, you can toggle it using Control + / (forward slash). I do need to add some GUI and better help system for those sort of preferences too.

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livebookmark.net on June 9th, 2007 at 8:49 pm said:

re: petewarden
almost all sane webmasters agree that autofollow of firefox is abusive. You’ve just introduced another abusive tool to firefox. I agree with jason_striegel about his approach on filtering the terms.
cloacking is ugly enough but even yahoo does that.You can’t do much about it.
I’m not trying to argue with you. I really liked the split screen idea. I guess you should just use HEAD to know it the page still exists and leave it to the split screen to find the term is still there.
when you include robots.txt support, make sure that you’ve adjusting the user-agent as well.
I appriciate your effort on trying the port the plugin to IE. Opera porting would be appriated as well.

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petewarden on August 18th, 2007 at 11:18 am said:

I’ve now completed the IE port, and renamed PeteSearch to the more descriptive GoogleHotKeys.

In addition to the blog posts covering the port I’ve also put together a public wiki with full documentation on creating your own Internet Explorer extensions, and there’s the full source code for the completed plugin for reference too.

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