Safari Plug-in in OW?

[tendril]

Hey all,

There's an amazingly beautiful plug-in for Safari (still in beta however) called PicLens (http://piclens.com/mac/) that enables iPhoto-like full-screen slideshows right in the browser (from certain sites, like Flickr or Google images).

It's a hassle to use Safari just to use this, so I was wondering if there's any way to get this plug-in to work with OW 5.5?

[zottel]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Plugins that are designed with the general "plugin" interface Objective C delivers work only with the app they are designed for. For the plugin to work with OW, the author would have to program a specific OW version.

Which leads me to my own question: There _are_ plugins that work with both Safari and OW and even other browsers, like the Flash plugin or the Schubert PDF plugin, or the QT plugin, of course. It seems these are those that only display stuff, not more. What are they based on? Is there some kind of general web plugin architecture for stuff that only handles certain kinds of data?

[Len Case]

There are 2 plugin architectures supported by the WebKit framework: "Netscape" plugins and "WebKit" plugins.

"Netscape" plugins (.plugin) conform to the Netscape plugin API which is a C API that designates the required functions that the plugin must support and the functions that the browser will provide. For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/.

"WebKit" plugins (.webplugin) are a new Objective-C based plugin API that Apple developed specifically for use in Safari and other WebKit based applications. For more information see http://developer.apple.com/documentation/InternetWeb/Conceptual/WebKit_PluginProgTopic/Tasks/WebKitPlugins.html.

[zottel]

But it's nevertheless true that a Safari plugin will normally not work with OW, right? I mean plugins that change the behaviour of the search box, for example?

To be exact: It has to be Webkit plugin, not a Safari plugin?