Mozilla Jetpack SDK 0.9 Paves the Way for the First Beta

Mozilla has released Jetpack SDK 0.9, the latest update to the alternative add-on platform for Firefox. The latest version paves the way for the first beta release of the platform and focuses on making it compatible with Electrolysis, the project which aims to add multi-process support to Firefox.

"This version continues our drive toward the first beta release of this new SDK for making Firefox add-ons," Mozilla wrote.

"Our focus for this release was to land important changes to the APIs, particularly those changes that pave the way for the integration of Electrolysis, the project to move add-on code execution to a separate process to improve application responsiveness and make it easier to measure add-on resource consumption," it explained.

The Context Menu API has been mostly rewritten to make it a better fit for Electrolysis. The team has been working on adapting the APIs that needed to be changed for multi-process support.

The Private Browsing API has also seen major changes for the same reason. The Electrolysis team aims to add full support for multiple processes to Firefox.

At the moment, several plugins run a in a process separate from the main Firefox one, but the goal is to have all plugins, add-ons and eventually individual tabs run separately for better performance and reliability.

"The Widget, Simple Storage, Notifications, Selection and Request APIs have been changed to use the 'EventEmitter' model for registering events," Mozilla explains.

This model is similar to the web event model used by several JavaScript libraries, Mozilla says.

The team is working towards a beta release, but there are a lot of things to be done yet. Eventually, the Jetpack SDK should be on par with the existing add-ons platform and should offer developers the same tools.

With the added benefit of using standard web technologies and more streamlined installs which don't require a browser restart, Jetpack extensions hold a lot of promise.

Mozilla Jetpack SDK 0.9 is available for download here.