A Different Kind of Firefox Extension

If you haven’t seen Garrett Serack‘s announcement, Kevin Miller has just released an extension for Firefox that will trigger the CardSpace client directly from the browser in all the same circumstances that IE7 would trigger CardSpace to start.

I’ve downloaded it and tried it with the resources immediately available to me, and it seems to work beautifully! There isn’t much to see, you install the .xpi and if you have the .NET framework installed, everything else works beautifully. In the case where the .NET framework isn’t or can’t be installed, it appears that the plugin just falls through.

I understand that in fact, the plugin is not hard-coded only to start CardSpace, but instead to start the identity selector of choice – this is a critical future feature, and I can’t wait to find out more about the mechanism used.

Garrett has already rewritten his detection script as well, so no worries on that front.

Beautiful work Kevin, my hat is off to you! I may never start IE7 again…

One note, if you download the add-on instead of directly installing, it may save as a .xpi.zip file. Don’t try to extract it – just rename it to .xpi and it will work. Er, not that I was caught out by such a simple thing… no not at all…

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