14 DAY TRIAL // One of Firefox's strongest points and by far its most popular feature is the capability to install user-created add-ons, small applications that improve browsing experience. Add-ons have been a great success both for users but also for developers and now Mozilla wants to make it even easier to make one so it launched Jetpack, an experimental program aimed at novice programmers. All you need is knowledge of HTML and some CSS and JavaScript.
Add-ons have proven a success for Mozilla with about 8000 developers working on 12,000 add-ons for Firefox and other Mozilla products, ranging from twitter clients, to ad blockers or colorful tabs. Still now they want to lower the bar for building an add-on with the purpose of allowing more people to contribute to enhancing the experience for users and maybe learning a thing or two in the process.
"Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play," Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and Nick Nguyen from the Jetpack development team wrote in a blog post.
The Jetpack project is still in early development, since it is only at version 0.1 now, so it's far from perfect. But even in this stage it still has some functionality, allowing developers to work with statusbars, tabs and more. A nice feature of the add-ons developed with Jetpack is that users don't have to restart the browser every time they install a new one.
"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," they wrote.