Plasma Browser Integration in 6.x

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It has been a little quiet around my pet project Plasma Browser Integration. On one hand because I’ve been busy with life but also because browser extension APIs haven’t really gained much new functionality. Nevertheless, for Plasma’s October release I finally found the time to take care of some long-standing feature requests and/or bug reports.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.broulik.de/2025/10/plasma-browser-integration-in-6-x/
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@broulik, is that really worth the potential difficulties in development?

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It’s not that difficult. You just cannot break the API contract between extension and host, like ever.

But for that it doesn’t really make a difference if I want to support 6.3 or 6.2 or 5.27 or some one using Debian still on 5.20. The problem is that the extension is distributed through the extension store outside the control of distros who like to keep things “stable”. So it’s easy to end up with latest extension but old host. That’s also the key difference to other Plasma components that likely talk to components from the same release. The other way round (new host and old extension) is not really supported but unlikely to break, really.

Personally, I still care a lot about 5.27 so I will definitely make sure it will continue working with it, especially when there was no real reason to “break” it.

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@broulik, I believe that some Firefox extensions are distributed via package managers. As an example, dnf5 info mozilla-ublock-origin.noarch returns:

Available packages
Name           : mozilla-ublock-origin
Epoch          : 0
Version        : 1.66.4
Release        : 1.fc42
Architecture   : noarch
Download size  : 3.8 MiB
Installed size : 4.0 MiB
Source         : mozilla-ublock-origin-1.66.4-1.fc42.src.rpm
Repository     : updates
Summary        : An efficient blocker for Firefox
URL            : https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
License        : GPL-3.0-only AND LicenseRef-Callaway-MIT AND LicenseRef-Callaway-OFL AND Unlicense
Description    : An efficient blocker: easy on memory and CPU footprint, and yet can load and
               : enforce thousands more filters than other popular blockers out there.
               : 
               : Flexible, it's more than an "ad blocker": it can also read and create filters
               : from hosts files.
Vendor         : Fedora Project

Would distributing it as a package be an improvement? Considering that firefox and the desktop environment both are, doing so appears rational to me, considering that, of what I see, all we’d lose is better reviews. [1]

  1. discuss.kde.org/t/14259/7 ↩︎

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That wouldn’t even be possible for any web browsers distributed outside of normal package managers, for example Firefox in a Flatpak.

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