Jan 23, 2022 Tags: devblog, programming
This post is at least a year old.
Just a short announcement post.
TL;DR: If you’re a Chrome or Chromium-based browser user, you can now officially use ff2mpv instead of a fork. It’s installable via the Chrome Web Store at the same URL as a previous fork of ff2mpv, thanks to the coordination and cooperation of the fork’s maintainer. Thanks to both eNV25 and DanSM-5 for all of their hard work!
In 2017, I wrote a small Firefox extension that takes URLs and plays them in MPV, my preferred desktop media player. I called that extension ff2mpv because it goes from Firefox (“ff”) to MPV and, like all programmers, I naturally excel at naming things.
I wrote ff2mpv entirely for my own personal use, but it’s still picked up a decent amount of use: just under a thousand users install it via AMO, and an unknown number sideload it. The majority of users (more than two thirds) are on Linux, with the remaining being nearly all Windows.
Somewhere along the way (and in the spirit of open source), someone also forked the codebase and did the legwork of porting it to Chromium-based browsers. Someone else, just this month, came along and did further legwork to make my Firefox-only copy compatible with Chromium as well.
Wonderful, but with one small hiccup: ff2mpv uses Manifest V2, since it’s what Firefox supports. But the Chrome team (in their infinite wisdom) has already sunset support for new extensions in MV2 format, requiring any new extension to use MV3 instead. That would mean splitting the manifest between Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, and more maintenance work.
As a workaround, I’ve coordinated with the maintainer of the previous Chrome fork of ff2mpv, turning his extension into a “group” extension that we can both publish to.
The end result: ff2mpv gets to remain on MV2 (at least until Firefox supports MV3), existing Chromium-based users don’t have to install a new extension (the extension ID and storefront URL remain unchanged!), and the codebases have been unified. Hooray!
All told, I’ve created a milestone release of ff2mpv (4.0.0) to mark the unification. Updates to the Firefox and Chromium distributions of ff2mpv will be performed in tandem going forwards, subject to review times from their respective extension stores.