What are Cu, Ci, Cc, …?

Firefox Development
#1

I came across these in the code and I am wondering what they mean.

const { components, Ci, Cr, Cu, CC } = require("chrome");

This seems to indicate that the C stands for chrome. But that’s all I can read into that. :slight_smile: What’s the background?

#2

These are structures to interface with XPCOM. Ci is a shorthand for Components.interfaces, Cr for Components.results, Cu for Components.utils and CC for Components.Constructor. I don’t think documentation for them has made it to https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org yet, so you can find the old MDN content at https://github.com/mdn/archived-content/tree/main/files/en-us/mozilla/tech/xpcom/language_bindings

#3

There is some information about XPCOM here but it does indeed not seem to include an answer to my question.

To maybe copy a bit from the components.interfaces docs in that repo:

Components.interfaces is a read-only object whose properties implement the nsIJSIID interface. Each object represents one of the XPCOM interfaces – that some component or another might or might not implement. It reflects only those interfaces which have been designated in their .idl description as scriptable , that is the interfaces which XPConnect is capable of reflecting into JavaScript.

Properties of the Components.interfaces object are used where XPCOM methods expect a parameter of type nsID . This includes nsISupports.QueryInterface() , the optional parameter accepted by nsIJSCID.getService() , nsIJSCID.createInstance() when called from JavaScript, and nsIClassInfo.getInterfaces() .

The properties of the Components.interfaces object can be enumerated using a for…in loop.

So what happens for example here:

const imageTools = Cc["@mozilla.org/image/tools;1"].getService(Ci.imgITools);

seems to be that Cc creates a new XPCOM object which is then used via the interface Ci.imgITools.

Is that about right?

#4

getService creates a reference to a service, which is a singleton-like structure in XPCOM. To get a separate instance you’d use createInstance as mentioned in your quote. The interface you pass in is the interface the XPCOM wrappers will expose, the underlying service/component may also implement other interfaces that will not be available (but you can use QueryInterface to add them).

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