14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Add-on SDK. Few people know what it is, some developers still shy away from it unfortunately, but the collection of tools has been a great boon for Firefox going forward.
Firefox was the first to introduce the concept of add-ons, pieces of code that extended the functionality of the browsers in ways that the core browser would have never done.
"I happened to be looking at the github tags page for the SDK just now and realized that it has been exactly one year to the day since the Jetpack project released SDK 1.0! The exact git change is here," Mozilla's Jeff Griffiths wrote.
"I pulled some quick stats from github in the tag range of 1.0 -> 1.8rc2, and it looks like we had 1429 changes in 196 pull requests added to the repo in the last 12 months," he said.
The Add-on SDK enables developers to use things they already know, JavaScript in particular, to create Firefox extensions, rather than have to learn way too much about the inner workings of Firefox, i.e. XUL, than it should be necessary.
The Add-on SDK has been several years in the making, it started out as Mozilla Labs' Jetpack, but only last year it was deemed stable enough for regular use.
In the last year you've probably seen quite a few add-ons labeled as "restartless." These are all built with the Add-on SDK. Still, they're a minority in the Mozilla Add-ons repository. That's partially because there are a lot of older add-ons that either still work or have been maintained.
Unfortunately, that's also partially because there are fewer developers working on Firefox add-ons, quite a few have moved on to Chrome. Hopefully though, as Firefox is finally catching up and even starting to take the lead again (it's not quite there yet), interest will pick up again.