Return of the Plasma Browser Plugin

You might remember some months ago that I posted a proof-of-concept plasma plugin for Mozilla Firefox on Linux. Well, a lot of tweaking later, we can now see a wide assortment of clocks in Mozilla Firefox on another platform (no prizes for guessing which one).

The most time consuming part of getting this up and running on Windows was actually just getting KDE compiled in the first place (emerge hates me). After that, it took about 10 lines of code and a few tweaks to CMakeLists.txt and it works.

Well, I say it works, but if I were more honest I’d say I managed to get the clocks to appear once out of many attempts in Firefox, and to grab a quick screenshot before I started trying to interact with them and brought everything crashing down. So, if you want to try this out yourself, be warned: you’ll need a lot of patience to do all the tweaking needed to get it working, and then it’ll still eat your babies.

Source code is in the same git repository as last time. See the README file included for barely-comprehensible instructions on how to destroy your soul.

When I blogged about this originally, there were lots of comments from people worrying about the security implications. I’d like to write about that in more detail, but I don’t have enough time, so it will have to wait for another day. For now I’ll just point out one thing: it is only a proof-of-concept at this stage. Obviously if this ever becomes a finished product, there will be security in place to stop plasmoids from the web interacting with your local computer in inappropriate ways – it will not work like Microsoft’s ActiveX, but much more like Adobe Flash.

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