I had an epiphany the other day, and I haven’t had time to explore every niggly little detail. So I am proposing a challenge for some enterprising hacker: make firefox.exe an out-of-process COM server for the mozilla activeX control.

Then, once it’s working, have the control register itself as a full-page handler for the text/xml, application/xhtml+xml, and application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml mime types. This would allow IE to seamlessly/silently display XHTML and XUL content using the (much more powerful and standards-compliant) gecko rendering engine. Note: this would not replace the default IE HTML rendering engine, which is possible if you hack the IE binary or the windows registry, but isn’t a “good thing”.

I don’t have the time/energy to actually code this, at least not for a decent while, but I would happy to give detailed assistance to an enterprising hacker: what’s involved is basically calling CoRegisterClassObject during the bootstrap process (somewhere in nsAppRunner.cpp or nsNativeAppSupportWin.cpp). It’s likely that the existing activex control code can be used almost unchanged, but you would probably need to excise some of the custom profile-handling code. There’s a little bit of COM magic needed to inform the appshellservice that it shouldn’t shut down until all embedded instances have gone away, in addition to ordinary XUL/browser windows.

Note: I haven’t talked to Adam Lock about this yet… I just posted on the spur of the moment. If somebody wants to make this happen, we definitely need to talk with him.

This entry was posted on 8 Jul, 2004 at 3:25 pm and is tagged with . Trackback.