[Aeni]

Essentially, the Skillchain Calculator has a problem. It's written in JavaScript. Mozilla's implementation of JavaScript is single-threaded. Everything UI-related in Mozilla is written in JavaScript.

So, when the calculator is off calculating chains, the entire browser locks up. Not good.

So about a year ago, I stopped actively developing the thing and went looking for solutions to this. A couple of months ago, I discovered that Mozilla's JavaScript implementation is, indeed, single threaded, meaning that the extension will always lock up the browser while calculating.

Since then, I've been looking for solutions to this problem, and trying to come up with some way to work around this. And I haven't really come up with anything managable.

Which means: I'm almost certainly, at this point, going to discontinue the Skillchain Calculator as an extension. It can't work without stopping the entire browser while calculating, and I don't want that. It's also gotten VERY ugly internally, as XUL/JavaScript do not lend themself to clean coding practices.

That doesn't mean it's going away, though. I'm working on re-writing it in Java. Java has the advantage of allowing multithreaded applications, so the entire program won't freeze simply because it's off calculating in the background. It also means that people won't need to use Firefox to get the extension, they just need Java. (Which is, of course, larger than Firefox. Can't win them all.)

Java also has the added advantage that it should make displaying the results in an understandable fashion much easier.

Unfortunately, I don't have an ETA on a release of the Java version. But it will hopefully be easier to use than the Mozilla version, as well as faster.

In other words, he needs to redo this in PHP Well, I think he should. But anyway, looks like development has stopped.