Tell the Firms! RECAP is Now Available for Microsoft Edge
After a decade-long journey, RECAP has finally arrived on the Microsoft Edge store, bringing our tool for enhancing PACER to a whole new audience of users. Edge is the only browser many attorneys are allowed to use, so this marks a major milestone in our mission to make public records more accessible to everyone.
This story begins in 2013, when we announced the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grant to develop an Internet Explorer version of the extension. At the time, IE supported extensions, in theory, but they relied on proprietary APIs and a different programming language than either the Firefox or Chrome version. Already, Chrome used JavaScript and Firefox used "XUL," so a third language seemed daunting, but we tried to make this work. Ultimately though, despite the grant, we failed — the technical challenges and limitations of the IE platform were simply too much for us.
That all changed a few years ago when Microsoft finally ditched Internet Explorer and built Edge on top of the Chrome browser platform. That opened the possibility of making some tweaks to RECAP and having it work on Edge. Amazing! The only problem? Edge only supports version three of Chrome's extension APIs, and until recently Firefox only supported version 2.
And so we waited for Firefox to join the other browsers.
That finally happened a few months ago, and we upgraded RECAP to use version three of the APIs. This was the biggest overhaul in RECAP's history, but the return justifies the work. As of today, RECAP works on Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.
We're excited to see what the future holds for our extension on Microsoft Edge. With the support of version three of the APIs, we're confident that we can continue to provide our users with a high-quality, reliable experience.
The only piece left now is getting the word out to the firms and corporations that can only use Edge. If you're a believer in our mission of bringing legal information to all, please help us spread the word!