Can this be revisited now that Firefox is on WebExtensions?

[ghost]

The browser extension APIs are designed to promote cross-browser compatibility among extensions. The WebExtension APIs is therefore, to a large extent, code-compatible with the extension API supported by Google Chrome and Opera. Extensions written for these browsers will, in most cases, run in Firefox with just a few changes.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension

It has been years without Firefox extension, and it sounds like it wouldn't be an enormous amount of effort to port from Chrome, assuming it goes smoothly. Can this please be revisited?

Thank you

[joaomgcd]

Unfortunately there's one big issue to add Firefox support: it doesn't support push messaging in extensions. I've filed a request about it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378096 Hopefully they can add it eventually!

[ghost]

Wow, I figured that would have been fixed by now .. Mozilla really needs to acknowledge this

Thanks for the info. I'm still stuck using pushbullet.. I don't know how it even still works, it hasn't been updated in eons

[dhavalsavalia]

Hello, I hope you are doing great! I wanted to know if there has been made any progress from Firefox team to solve this issue? Thanks and stay safe!

[joaomgcd]

Unfortunately no, sorry... I am looking at a different solution though myself...

[eloyleonardo]

First of all you have great apps. I can imagine that you have a huge effort to maintain a large number of apps and much of them is a low level app, so changes in android an improvements on the app can be very time consuming. But let's get back to join extension, why don't you create an desktop app as frontend to join ? In windows you have a native app, and that is great, but on mac or Linux we don't have a great solution like that. Now we have flutter, electron and those are great tools to create desktop apps to multiple platforms, maybe can be a way better then maintain multiples extensions and the website.

[joaomgcd]

The reason I can't do that is because those platforms don't have push functionality like windows apps do as far as I know. A Windows app can receive pushes from the web (like a Chrome extension can too) so Join can push stuff to it. Without that I have no viable way to do it. I could do it like Pushbullet for example, but that would be too expensive and I would need to charge a subscription for Join, just like they do...

[Kyrluckechuck]

I wonder if that would be a viable option -- to have a subscription which enables push notifications (and would help us support you longer-term), and once it's possible to do it in a more native-way, you could switch it over and the subscription would still exist to support you and/or enable other features which cost you to run?

[joaomgcd]

I really don't want to bring subscriptions to Join. If users so much as smell subscriptions they immediately write off the app. I've seen it happen many times before with other apps so I'm not going down that road :)