14 DAY TRIAL // Development on Jetpack, Mozilla's lightweight extension platform for Firefox, is moving at a blistering pace, and, just five days since the last version, Mozilla is launching Jetpack 0.4. You'd think that a work week is hardly enough time to get one feature done, but the new version is actually sporting an impressive number of improvements. The two months it took the company to get to 0.3 now look like ages.
Launched at the end of May, Jetpack is indented as a supplement to the regular extension platform providing budding web developers with the possibility to create extensions for Firefox using only simple and standard web technologies like HTML, CSS and, especially, JavaScript. While there are thousands of developers working on Firefox extensions, it does take some specialized knowledge and means learning XUL, the XML-based interface language Mozilla employs in Firefox. Jetpack lowers the bar and allows much more people to develop extensions, one of the main reasons behind Firefox's success.
Jetpack 0.4 comes with two new APIs, most notably the Audio Recording ones, bringing rich media capabilities to extensions developed with Jetpack. The feature is supported on all platforms, Windows, Linux and Mac, but only for Firefox 3.5, which supports the <audio> tag from the proposed HTML 5 standard.
“Aligned with Mozilla’s goal of enabling open video and audio on the Web, we are pleased to announce the release of Jetpack 0.4, which includes experimental support for recording audio directly to Ogg-Vorbis. These new audio encoding APIs will allow developers to build Jetpacks that record high-quality audio directly from within the browser, which can then be played back using Firefox 3.5’s new audio tag support,” Anant Narayanan and David Dahl wrote for the Jetpack development team.
The second set of APIs is also interesting and could prove very powerful, allowing Jetpack extensions to modify the behavior and layout of web pages similar to the popular Greasemonkey extension. Both new sets of APIs are experimental and are expected to evolve rapidly with the rest of the Jetpack environment.
Jetpack 0.4 is available here.