FireGPG

[AlexanderWillner]

Nice idea, thank you. What about creating a wiki and explaining the difference to FireGPG (http://getfiregpg.org/s/home)? Or maybe you want to revamp FireGPG instead?

[daviddahl]

I need to do a lot of documentation. the basic premise here is not to be a product but to offer an implementation / prototype for browser vendors to consider adding this as a standard feature. I wanted to start with the tiniest kernel of functionality.

[AlexanderWillner]

We might want to join our efforts? See http://github.com/AlexanderWillner/GPGMail_Mobile/wiki/Introduction
A JS implementation would be suitable for all browser vendors on all operating systems.

[daviddahl]

I would be happy to help - the focus I have right now is on Firefox as all of the code i am writing depends on NSS - which is also used by Chrome, however, I do not think the NSS libs are exposed like in Firefox, which has jsctypes. The nice thing about my efforts are that all of the crypto happens in a very fast C-based implementation, which is exposed to JS via jsctypes. My extension then exposes that (privileged code) to content JS.

[AlexanderWillner]

My point of view:

• C implementation: very fast, but then just invoke a local GnuPG installation. I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to rewrite gpg code again (since it can be quite complex and there are existing robust implementations). But this is (I guess) what was done in FireGPG.
• JS implementation: slower but usable due modern JS compilers. It will not be possible to implement the whole GnuPG stack but code exists and it'll be compatible with all browsers.

[daviddahl]

I am really not too concerned about supporting all browsers. What I'd rather do is provide a robust prototype in firefox that is a great model for other browsers to follow.