Mozilla Jetpack SDK 0.6 Starts Work on Electrolysis Compatibility

Mozilla has released the monthly update to the Jetpack SDK. There aren’t that many notable changes in Jetpack SDK 0.6 as most of the planned features were not completed in time for the deadline. The biggest update is the possibility to specify a widget width and better integration with Firefox 4.

“Jetpack SDK 0.6 is here, yay! The release includes a couple of notable enhancements, it is now possible to specify a width for widgets to make them wider or narrower as needed. Modules requiring access to Components (and Cc, Ci, etc.) must now explicitly obtain this privilege, which means that modules do not have elevated chrome privileges by default,” Mozilla Labs’ Myk Melez announced.

“Based on the feedback we’ve received from users of earlier versions of the SDK, the release also incorporates a number of bug fixes to improve the reliability of the SDK, including: certain tests no longer fail when run against a localized (i.e. non-English) version of Firefox. Testing will continue to work against newer Firefox 4 beta builds as they are released,” he added.

A major focus for this release has been on adapting the Jetpack SDK to Firefox’s upcoming multi-process features. The project, dubbed Electrolysis (E10S internally), is still a work-in-progress. Out-of-process plugins have been included in the latest Firefox stable builds, starting with Firefox 3.6.4, but there are plans to expand the functionality to more plugins and more Firefox components.

There were four APIs planned for Jetpack 0.6 which would bring better support for Electrolysis but all of them missed the deadline, signaling that the problem may be tougher than initially thought. For Jetpack 0.7, the plans are now to complete the APIs on which work has started already, but also to include new APIs like a Window API, a Sidebar API or a Places API.

Jetpack SDK 0.6 is available for download here.