Firefox add-on local area network communication capabilities

Question

I would like to develop a firefox extension that communicates with other firefox extensions in the same LAN.

Is there anything preventing this? Can this be technically done?

Being able of having access to the minimum networking capabilities would be sufficient, won't have a problem implementing the protocol.

However, if there is anything like network discoverability already in firefox that would tell me of other firefox browsers in the same LAN would be fantastic.

I've read it's in the roadmap for Chrome, don't know the status in Firefox and cannot find info about it.

Answer 1

We recently landed nsIUDPSocket, a UDP socket component, usable from add-ons, which allows you to implement your own network discovery system, like SSDP. Bug 869869 has some of the details of the landing and nsIUDPSocket can be found here:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/base/public/nsIUDPSocket.idl