Calling Firefox XPCOM from external app?

Question

Context: we need to read Firefox cookies in our app; until Firefox 3.5, this was possible by reading cookies.txt / cookies.sqlite. In Firefox 3.5, it exclusively locks the cookie file so outside apps can't read it (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476167), and even if we make a local copy, FF doesn't always flush the cookies to disk until exit so they may not be there.

The suggested solution is to use nsICookieManager, which looks like what we need -- but how can I get at one of those from a process that isn't Firefox?

Everything I see about XPCOM suggests I can only use it from firefox extensions -- do we have to write an extension, and then somehow invoke Firefox to install our extension and then somehow invoke the extension itself to pass cookies back out?

Answer 1

Yes - you'll have to build an extension which communicates from your application to Firefox. You can install the add-on with the windows registry (assuming you are on windows).