Archive for February 11th, 2010

xpcnativewrappers=no going away

February 11th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized

Way back in 2005, jst, brendan, and bz combined to implement XPCNativeWrappers (or, as I’ll refer to them, XPCNWs). XPCNWs have the somewhat bizarre behavior that they incompatibly change the view of an object from an extension’s perspective. For example, an extension that grabs a content window’s “window” object and tries to call a function on it that is not part of the DOM, would work before XPCNWs, but not after.

Not having concrete data on how many extensions would be affected by such a change and erring on the side of caution, we implemented a way to opt out of XPCNWs. Basically, if your extension broke because of XPCNWs you could ask Gecko to give you the old, insecure, behavior. The intent at the time was to let authors flip the switch off, then go back to their extension and fix things until they could turn on XPCNW support.

Now, in order to support a more secure and easier to use platform, it is necessary to remove support for xpcnativewrappers=no. This will mean some work on extension authors’ parts:

  • If your extension relies on xpcnativewrappers=no, your extension will stop working correctly when bug 523994 lands.
  • In order to fix it, you should identify the parts of your extension that require direct access to content objects. This should be limited to three cases:
    1. If your extension depends on XBL bindings attached to content objects (namely, being able to call functions or get and set properties created by the XBL binding) then you will need to use the .wrappedJSObject of the XPCNW.
    2. If you need to call functions or access properties defined by the content page (for example, if you wrote an extension to add a delete button to gmail and there’s a window.delete() function defined somewhere).
    3. See The devmo page on XPCNativeWrappers for more.
  • Note that if all you do with content objects is use DOM methods, then everything should simply continue to work (and you shouldn’t be using xpcnativewrappers=no anyway)!

I’ll write a second post soon to describe the what and why of XPCNWs and .wrappedJSObject.

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