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wayne
wayne

Reputation: 201

Calling Firefox XPCOM component from Thunderbird extension

I'm doing a Thunderbird extension that will get the stored username/password in Firefox and import those accounts into Thunderbird. This results in the need of nsILoginManager, but I'm not sure how to make it work from a Thunderbird extension. Is it possible to do so?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 364

Answers (1)

Wladimir Palant
Wladimir Palant

Reputation: 57651

You pretty much cannot. In addition to XPCOM simply not working across different processes, the complications are:

  • What if Firefox isn't running?
  • What if the password storage is encrypted with a master password?
  • What if there is more than one Firefox profile?

The best you could do would be:

  • Start Firefox with a command line like firefox -url file://foo/bar/extension.xpi - make sure that Firefox is running and the user is asked to install extension.xpi. It should be a bootstrapped extension so that no browser restart is required.
  • That extension gets the necessary data from nsILoginManager (which involves a password prompt if the user has a master password defined) and sends it back to Thunderbird.
  • After that this extension uses the Add-on Manager API to uninstall itself.

This is far from being a smooth user experience of course. As to how the two extensions (one in Thunderbird, the other in Firefox) would communicate - TCP sockets would probably be the easiest way. The Thunderbird extension would create a server socket and wait for the Firefox extension to connect to it.

Upvotes: 1

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