Introducing Mozilla Firefox Jetpack

With Jetpack for Firefox, Mozilla Labs is nothing short of exploring new ways to extend and personalize the web. The project is designed to lend a streamline add-on development for the Firefox open-source browser. Mozilla recognized developers building add-ons for Firefox as a source of innovation on the Internet, numbering in excess of 1 billion add-on installations to date. In this regard, Jetpack is designed to take Mozilla and Firefox beyond just scratching the surface of the add-on development community's potential, offering a new way for third-party developers to catalyze the evolution of Firefox and to fuel customization for the browser.

“In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know,” revealed Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and Nick Nguyen from the Jetpack development team. “With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack Feature’s can be written in under a dozen lines of code.”

What Mozilla is doing is effectively attempting to open up Firefox add-on development to a larger development audience. In this sense, Jetpack relies on web technologies to kick Firefox up a notch. Mozilla Labs indicated that developers would be able to leverage HTML, CSS and Javascript when building add-ons. Essentially, website developers are free to tackle Firefox add-on development by turning to resources already familiar.

“Most importantly, from a user perspective, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to the browser without a restart or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience. As with all Mozilla Labs initiatives, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development & experimentation,” Raskin added.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack - Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Create Jetpack Features in Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.