iCab Support?

I've been a long time user of 1Password, and have written in these forums before, requesting support for iCab.

And y'all eventually provided it, and I was happy, thank you.

Having recently had to upgrade to Lion, because of the impending demise of MobileMe, I was disheartened to discover that iCab is no longer supported.

I wrote to the developer of iCab, Alexander Clauss, and he said he's had some trouble getting specific information on what would be needed for iCab and 1Password to interoperate.

iCab is a great browser that offers features unmatched by others, and 1Password is a great utility for managing all the myriad passwords required in this day and age.

If someone could provide more information, either to me, or to Alexander, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks for your help,

Drew McCarthy

Comments

  • khad
    khad
    1Password Alumni
    edited June 2012
    Hi Drew,

    Thanks for taking the time to ask about this again. The short answer is that iCab simply doesn't offer the extension APIs that we need in order to implement the 1Password extension.

    The old extension (pre-Lion) used a technology called Scripting Additions. Apple removed Scripting Additions from developer builds of Lion and brought them back only at the last minute. This is likely a sign that Apple plans to phase this technology out, and soon, but is giving developers a little more time to make the transition. Because we're trying to standardize our extension experience across browsers and prepare for the future, we have already taken Apple's progressive philosophy to heart and are looking towards the future to create a better experience for all customers.

    OmniWeb is a similar situation and I think Ken Case of The Omni Group explained it well:


    Apple is trying to make Safari more secure, so they've created a sandbox for browser extensions written in JavaScript—very similar to the extension mechanisms for Firefox and Chrome. AgileBits has rebuilt their 1Password browser extension using this approach, and they've got it working in those three browsers.

    OmniWeb supports several mechanisms for extending the browser (some dating back to the mid-'90s), and those mechanisms still work—but none of them are JavaScript-based, so they're not compatible with this new 1Password browser extension.



    t sounds like the easiest way would be for OmniWeb to implement the same sort of browser extension mechanism that Safari, Firefox, and Chrome have implemented. (That approach would have other benefits as well, potentially giving OmniWeb the ability to run other extensions.)

    That seems like a reasonable approach to me, but we have a lot of higher priority projects on our plate at the moment so I'm not sure how soon we'll be able to do that.

    Keep letting us know this is important to you: that helps us decide where to put our resources. And please, don't blame Apple or AgileBits for making a very appropriate decision to implement a more secure system for browser extensions.


    So at the moment we don't have any plans to support iCab, as it does not provide the same extensions framework available in Safari. For now we're focusing our efforts on browsers with a rich set of tools for extensions; currently this includes Safari, Firefox, and Chrome.

    If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. We are always here to help!
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