Blog design. Affordable design for pioneering companies.
Litmus. Elegant compatibility testing for your sites and emails.

Unsalted (That's our clever name for our blog)

August 26: How AEVITA reused Chris' code

For those of you who haven't been watching the progress of Chris Pedrick's ordeal with AEVITA's "Web Inspector" IE toolbar, it might be worth a quick read of his blog post.

After reading Chris' blog and the many (51) comments of support, I thought I'd add my opinion on a few things based on my experience of developing a similar tool - CSSVista. CSSVista is an standalone application to help you work on your CSS code in both Firefox and Internet Explorer simultaneously.

"This makes me suspect that much of the logic was probably taken from my code, although this is most likely hard to prove as I would guess that the internal code of an Internet Explorer add-on is very different to that of a Mozilla Firefox extension."


While I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject and I haven't personally seen Chris' code, it seems to me that it might've been quite easy to adapt it into an Internet Explorer add-on. I believe this because I've been working with both the Internet Explorer control and the Mozilla control and I've found that by interfacing to IHTMLDocument, IHTMLDocument2 and other interfaces you can use almost identical code to interact with the two browsers. I'm not entirely certain that this same logic applies to firefox extensions, but from what I understand on the subject, it is my opinion that very little work would be involved in converting Chris' extension into AEVITA's IE toolbar.

Posted by Matt.

Comments

That's interesting, Matt. I was suggesting the code was copied because the way the features worked in their tool was almost identical to how they worked in Web Developer - not to mention the fact that the list of features was basically the same.

However, it's interesting to hear that there are similarities between the internal workings of Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Perhaps this might make the possibility of an Internet Explorer version of Web Developer easier than I had thought! :)

Chris Pederick
August 27, 2005 12:06 AM

Add A Comment


(required)


(required, Gravatar-enabled)


Remember Me?

Preview