From: Olof-Joachim Frahm <olof@macrolet.net>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 12:00:18 +0000 (+0200)
Subject: Add cookie server post.
X-Git-Url: http://repo.macrolet.net/gitweb/?p=blog.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=90ce5410d1b81a5de34c9567a265103a83b221aa

Add cookie server post.
---

diff --git a/extensions.post b/extensions.post
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+;;;;;
+title: Extensions, extensions, extensions
+date: 2015-04-17 10:15:23
+format: md
+;;;;;
+
+For the longest time I've been using quite a number of Firefox extensions.  The
+known problem with that is a steady slowdown, which is only amplified by my
+habit of soft bookmarks, i.e. having hundreds of open tabs with their
+corresponding state (which is the whole reason to do that).
+
+However seeing that a lot of state is captured in a very inconvenient form,
+that is, it's hard to modify a long list of tabs, I want to make both this and
+incidentally also sharing of state between sessions and even browsers much
+easier.
+
+The idea is to separate part of the browser state into a separate component,
+namely a database server for cookies (and other local storage), tabs, sessions
+and bookmarks.  This way and by having a coarse control over loading of
+sessions the process of migrating state between sessions and browsers should be
+much easier.
+
+Fortunately most of the browser extensions APIs seem to be usable enough to
+make this work for at least Firefox and Chrome, so at the moment I'm
+prototyping the data exchange.  Weird as it is for Chrome you have to jump
+through some conversion hoops (aka local native extensions via a local process
+exchanging data via stdio), so it seems that the Firefox APIs, since they allow
+socket connections, are a bit friendlier to use.  That said, the exchange
+format for Chrome, Pascal string encoded JSON, seems like a good idea with the
+exception of forcing local endianess, which is completely out of the question
+for a possibly network enabled system (which is to say, I'm definitely going to
+force network byte order instead).