Smaller Firefox connector

teknowledgist
I am excited about Zotero becoming more browser independent. One reason is that I'm hopeful the large Firefox add-on can be replaced with a much leaner "Connector" (probably a "lite" add-on).

I deal with a lot of multi-user machines which regularly erase user profiles. When a computer has to generate (or synch if using remote profiles) a large default profile at login it can really make the computer seem slow (or broken). When 70% of that system profile is Zotero, it gets hard to justify keeping the Zotero Firefox add-on.

Is a much smaller Firefox add-on in the works to operate with Zotero Standalone only?

Thanks,

PS - I'm also hopeful for an IE connector; Not for myself, but some people can't be convinced not to use IE and would greatly benefit from Zotero as well.
  • Simon
    No. This would be non-trivial to do, and having both a connector and a full extension available for Firefox would be confusing for users. However, we might be able to package a future version of Zotero so that the extension doesn't need to be decompressed, in which case it would consist of a single 3MB file in the extensions folder, assuming you have Firefox 4 or later.
  • teknowledgist
    I understand that the Firefox extension is the origin of Zotero, but it's too bad it has to be so large when the connectors for Chrome and Safari are much smaller (or at least appear to be).

    If the entire 20+ MB of a default Firefox Zotero extension install (with word processor plugins) can be reduced to 3 or 4 MB that would be a huge improvement (especially because creating lots of little files takes significantly longer than one large file).

    Thanks for the prompt response.
  • RintzeRintze
    @Simon, would it be possible to store the extension outside the user profile by using a path file as described at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_an_Extension#Test ?
  • Simon
    Rintze's suggestion will work fine with Firefox <8, but for Firefox 8+ the extension will get disabled automatically unless you tweak some preferences. There's also a global extensions directory that you could use, with the same caveats. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Installing_extensions

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