Opera Proposes NEX Packaging Format For Browser Extensions
A future W3C standard for packaging cross-browser, add-on development
Opera detailed a proposal for NEX, the Navigator Extension format, a new vendor-neutral browser extension packaging format that it hopes to turn into a future W3C standard for packaging cross-browser, add-on development. Currently, Chromium-based browsers use Google’s CRX format for delivering browser extensions. Opera, which recently switched to Chromium, says it developed NEX to “find a solution that would allow us to extend the Chromium CRX feature set without compromising the current ecosystem that has grown up around that format.”
Because of this, NEX is basically a super-set of the CRX environment that developers are already using today. It supports a majority of the standard Chromium APIs for browser extensions, as well as Opera’s Speed Dial API. By default, Opera will also continue to run many CRX-based extensions.
Opera notes that its competitor Mozilla is currently driving the standards work on normalizing the packaging and manifest format for browser add-ons, and the company clearly wants to play a more prominent role in this process.
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