Mozilla Jetpack flies out of laboratory into loving arms of Firefox

SDK lands with a bump

By Kelly Fiveash, 10th March 2010

Mozilla has promoted its web extensions prototype package - Jetpack - by pushing it upstairs and readying it for production with its Firefox browser.

The outfit said yesterday that it had created the first release of a software development kit (SDK) for Jetpack to show off the platform's "foundations and extensibility".

However, the all-important APIs for building rich add-ons are missing from this release, noted Mozilla.

"With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on - one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update," it said.

The experimental Jetpack project began life in May last year and was created for developers with HTML, JavaScript and CSS standard web skills to make add-ons for Mozilla’s popular open source browser, Firefox.

A developer interested in tinkering with the Jetpack SDK, which comes loaded with an extensible Firefox add-ons library, command-line tools and a modern IDE, will need to make a few tweaks to Firefox first, said the organisation.

However, Mozilla is also being cautious about usage of the Jetpack SDK, which it said will replace the Jetpack 0.8 prototype over the next few months.

"For now we recommend that authors who wish to create simple extensions continue to use Jetpack 0.8. The popular and simple IDE available in 0.8 is being revamped with major enhancements for use with the SDK and will be available for developers in Q2 2010," it said. ®

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

COMMENTS

House Rules Send Corrections

All Reader Comments (4)

Latest Comments

Posted Thursday 11th March 2010 11:07 GMT

Citizen Kaned

nope its you....

its not like they went, "oh thats a nice body shape" (car analogy) they copy and pasted it. thats a very different thing. i would expect better from mozilla but i find its just as unreliable as IE. every firefox ive used has some bugs that make it maybe more secure but just as unreliable as IE.

Posted Thursday 11th March 2010 11:04 GMT

Atli

Relax!..

Did you read the update at the bottom?

Mozilla was considering buying their designs so they used them in their development builds (which include public developmental stuff, it being open-source and all). New builds will, however, replace them with original designs from Mozilla.

We all do it. I mean; I've used logos and graphics from random websites during development of my websites, and replaced them only shortly before release. (I sometimes even use the Google logo directly from their website as a header placeholder :P) - Mozilla just has the "disadvantage" of being open-source, and thus a lot more public in their development than most of us are.

Posted Wednesday 10th March 2010 15:06 GMT

Semanticist