Archive for January, 2010

File Under: Browsers
Jan
21
2010

Firefox Has Been Hitting the Gym — Version 3.6 Is Faster, More Capable

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Mozilla has unleashed Firefox 3.6, the next version of the popular open source web browser.

The new and improved Firefox 3.6 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

There isn’t much new to look at on the surface, but we’d strongly recommend you upgrade to Firefox 3.6, based on the work that’s been done to improve the browser’s speed and support for the latest web technologies.

Thursday’s release brings significant performance boosts and a number of new features like support for custom skins, full-screen support for native web video and much-improved font support for developers looking to use new fonts on their sites.

It arrives only six months after the previous version, Firefox 3.5. The shorter-than-usual wait between versions means that Firefox 3.6 doesn’t have quite as many new standout features as 3.5 brought to the browser when it debuted. But we don’t want to give the impression that Firefox 3.6 is only an incremental performance upgrade from the previous version.

A Nimbler Fox

The fact is that there’s quite a bit of new technology under the hood. Users who spend the bulk of their day in JavaScript-heavy web apps — which these days is most of us — will notice faster page loads thanks to improvements to the browser’s rendering engine. Much of the added speed is due to enhancements to TraceMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript-rendering engine.

Not only does the tweaked TraceMonkey speed up webpage rendering, it’s now available to speed up Firefox UI elements written in JavaScript. That change means the Firefox interface is snappier, and — when combined with the new version of Gecko, Firefox’s core rendering engine — there’s a noticeable improvement in Firefox 3.6′s overall performance.

In our testing of pre-release versions (the last of which were nearly identical to the final code), JavaScript-heavy sites like FriendFeed, Facebook and Gmail loaded faster, and the browser’s initial startup time was much better than with Firefox 3.5 — especially if you’re reopening a large number of tabs.

Also new under the hood is the new about:support page which offers a simple place to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list of installed extensions, any user-modified preference settings, links to installed plug-ins, and other configuration details.

Fullscreen HTML5 Video

Firefox 3.6 now supports fullscreen video playback through native HTML5 video embeds. Just right-click a video embedded using the HTML5 video tag and you’ll see a new menu item for full-screen playback.

Currently video on the web is generally embedded using proprietary technologies like Adobe’s Flash Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin.

Native HTML5 video will give users a way to watch movies online without the need of third-party plug-ins.

Firefox previously supported HTML5 native video but lacked the ability to play those videos in full-screen mode, an oversight that Firefox 3.6 corrects, putting open source video on largely equal footing with proprietary technologies like Flash or Silverlight.

Curiously, Firefox 3.6′s release comes only a day after YouTube announced it would begin supporting playback of embedded videos with HTML5, albeit using the h.264 codec which Firefox does not support, as it’s proprietary. Mozilla prefers the open source Ogg Theora video format instead.

More Web-Standards Support

Web developers and open-web proponents alike will be happy to hear that quite a few new features in CSS 3 have made their way into Firefox 3.6. Firefox now supports the background-size property as well as some cool tricks for handling background images with CSS. Designers can specify the size of background images on web pages, stretching them by dictating what percentage of the browser window’s width they take up.

There are also some new methods for applying gradients to page backgrounds, enabling designers to create more interesting, colorful backgrounds without using images at all, just by defining a few colors in their HTML.

Firefox 3.6 also supports the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which allows developers to use server-side fonts to build better typography into their designs.

Personas

Firefox 3.6 brings built-in support for lightweight themes, which Mozilla calls Personas. Personas have been around for a while (you can even sync them across multiple browsers if you’re running Weave, Mozilla’s syncing tool), but installing Personas previously required a separate extension to manage them.

Now Personas can be installed right out of the box, allowing you to tweak and theme Firefox as you’d like. Although Personas don’t offer quite the options of full-fledged themes, they’re much easier to create and install. If you’d like to try out some custom themes, head over to the Personas site.

Improved Tab-Switching Previews

Also new on the tab front are the long-awaited preview thumbnails in Firefox’s built-in tab switcher, which have finally arrived, sort of. The tab previews have been in the works for quite some time, and — sadly — enabling the previews will still require a trip to about:config (set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true).

Unfortunately for Windows 7 users, much of the Windows 7 integration — like Aero tab previews and jump lists — did not make the final release. Not officially, anyway.

According to Mozilla Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner, support for Windows 7′s Aero Peek tab previews — the page and tab previews available in the Windows 7 task bar — can be enabled in the about:config page. But the feature wasn’t quite ready to be switched on by default.

If you’d like to turn it on now, just be aware that sometimes the previews don’t render properly. Look for this one to be officially turned on by an incremental update in the near future.

Security Enhancements

Firefox 3.6 includes the ability to check for out -of-date plug-ins and will point you to the offending plug-in’s website to download the latest version.

The primary target here is the Flash plug-in, which previously had no update mechanism in Firefox and could leave Firefox users vulnerable to attack even if the browser itself was up-to-date.

Mozilla has also changed the way third-party add-ons integrate with Firefox. The Firefox components directory is now off-limits to third-party tools like Firefox add-ons. The move is mainly designed to make Firefox more stable by preventing add-ons from accessing lower-level tools that could cause crashes.

According to Mozilla, there are no features to be gained from accessing the components directory, so your favorite add-ons should not be adversely affected by the change.

Why the Long Wait?

Although the turnaround time for Firefox 3.6 was faster than its predecessor, Mozilla was still plagued by delays, and it released an unprecedented five beta versions to testers before Thursday’s final release.

However, while there were more betas than previous releases, according to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, the overall development time was actually shorter.

“We did something very different with betas this time around, and this has been one of the shortest beta periods in terms of calendar time that a Firefox release has ever had,” Beltzner tells Webmonkey.

“Once people have agreed to test a beta, it’s our responsibility to give them updates as quickly as possible. Instead of spending three to four weeks making changes and releasing a beta, for Firefox 3.6 we decided to create a beta version that would be updated every one or two weeks with the latest changes.”

He says that cranking out more betas at a faster pace made development smoother and allowed for more feedback from Mozilla’s community of over 600,000 beta testers.

Conclusion

Firefox 3.6 is not the radical overhaul that Firefox 3.5 offered, but the latest version is a worthy upgrade nonetheless. The welcome speed improvements combined with the UI changes and expanded HTML5 support make Firefox 3.6 a must-have upgrade.

We’re already looking forward to the next version of Firefox, tentatively listed as Firefox 3.7, which, with any luck will bring isolated tabs for application crashes (a la Google Chrome), integration of the Ubiquity add-on into the Awesome bar and of course, even more enhancements for HTML 5.

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File Under: Browsers, Software
Jan
20
2010

Firebug 1.5 Adds More Web Developer Tricks to Firefox

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Firebug, the developer tool for debugging JavaScript, tweaking CSS, and inspecting network traffic, has announced a major new release — Firebug 1.5.

Firebug is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a JavaScript debugging powerhouse. It eases the web development process by providing console interfaces, XmlHttpRequest tracking, live HTML and CSS editing and all sorts of other useful information about what your pages are doing (or not doing). Firebug is so popular with web developers there are even extensions for the Firebug extension — sort of meta-extensions if you will. Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s Page Speed are the most popular.

The latest release of Firebug improves the add-on’s stability, adds several new features and makes Firebug compatible with the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6, which is expected next week.

Among the updates in Firebug 1.5 are a much-improved Inspector tool, which allows you to select any element on the page and see the HTML and any applied CSS rules; and several major new features for the Net panel, which can debug XMLHttpRequests. For a complete list of everything new in Firebug 1.5 be sure to check out the release notes on the Firebug wiki.

To grab a copy of Firebug 1.5, you can head to the Get Firebug site, or wait for the update to show up on the Mozilla add-ons website. The Firebug blog says the latest release should be on the Mozilla site next week (if you want to try Firebug betas or stay at the bleeding edge of Firebug development, we recommend installing the add-on through the Firebug site).

Firebug works wherever Firefox does, but be aware that, if you’re using Firefox on 64-bit versions of Linux, some users have reported problems with Firebug 1.5.

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File Under: Ajax, Frameworks, JavaScript
Jan
19
2010

JQuery Celebrates 4 Years on the Web With New Release

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Popular Ajax library jQuery is celebrating its fourth birthday with a major new release — JQuery 1.4.

JQuery has long had a devoted following among interface designers. Proponents tout its speed and lightweight structure which make it easy to integrate complex effects with only a few lines of code. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and independent web developers everywhere have turned to jQuery to handle Ajax, JavaScript animations and other hallmarks of the modern web.

The latest version of jQuery boasts some impressive speed gains and represents a ground up refactoring of much of jQuery’s underlying code. According the jQuery’s developers this release is significantly faster across browsers and eliminates much of the redundancy in jQuery’s internal functions.

Other nice changes in this release include support for HTML5 elements in serialization calls, the ability to test for specific rendering engines (for example, target WebKit with jQuery.browser.webkit) and support for per-property easing in your animations.

For full details on everything that’s new, check out the jQuery blog post and be sure to look over the backwards-incompatible changes before you attempt to upgrade any of your jQuery projects.

As always you can grab both the minified and full source versions of jQuery from the download page or simply include the Google hosted version in your projects by including the URL, http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js, in your projects.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
19
2010

Mozilla Speeds Up Firefox Factory, Plans More Updates More Often

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Firefox 3.6 is very nearly a done deal. Mozilla has pushed out a second release candidate and Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, tells Webmonkey that the final browser release should arrive by the end of January.

That’s great news for Firefox fans, but it also typically brings a bit of letdown with it — all those features that didn’t make it in Firefox 3.6 will now have to wait some time before the next revision rolls around.

Or not. Mozilla is openly discussing a change to the Firefox development process that would make the browser more of what’s know as a “rolling distro” — updates would be pushed out as they’re ready, rather than waiting around for the next major version.

That’s very similar to the development model used by Google’s Chrome browser, which pushes out frequent minor feature updates in addition to larger x.0 releases. It makes sense that Mozilla would be adopting this philosophy similar to Chrome — and other fast-moving desktop software products, we should add — considering how quickly Chrome has changed so many aspects of the development, features and look-and-feel of other browsers. We touched upon the signposts of this shift in our look back at the first five years of Firefox’s history. Newer versions of Firefox going forward will feature several enhancements that bear similarities to Chrome: a tabs-on-top interface, isolated processes within tabs and a JavaScript-powered extensions framework. Firefox already has a private surfing mode like other browsers.

It’s a welcome change for users, too. Imagine seeing an enhancement in the pre-release builds that you end up loving because it makes certain sites run faster, only to see it pulled before the final release because it’s not quite 100 percent ready. It’s incredibly frustrating, because you’ll have to wait months for the next round of Firefox betas before you can start using it again. Well, not anymore.

Details of Mozilla’s plan are still vague, but Beltzner tells us that the plan is to work more features into minor updates. He followed up those points, which he told us in an interview last week, with a blog post letting Firefox fans know that, in the future, they won’t need to wait for a major release to get a faster, more stable browser.

That doesn’t mean though that Firefox is moving to the cram-it-down-your-throat update approach of Google Chrome. You’ll be able to turn off automatic updates and when it comes to features in minor upgrades, them emphasis will be on minor — behind-the-scenes changes that users probably won’t notice at first glance.

Beltzner’s examples include things like small speed improvements, support for new font technologies or improvements in Firefox’s open web video support.

One thing Beltzner is adamant about is that any such minor feature updates must not noticeably change Firefox.

I think of it this way,” he writes, “if I take my car in for service and it comes out with better fuel efficiency, that’s great … [but] if my gearshift has changed location, I’d be pretty surprised and upset. We shouldn’t be doing anything in a maintenance release that could leave a user surprised and upset, period.”

The change does mean there will likely be no Firefox 3.7. The main thing on the road map for Firefox 3.7 is the integration of Electrolysis, which allows Firefox to split the browser UI, web content and plug-ins into separate processes for improved stability.

Since this is precisely the under-the-hood, transparent update that Beltzner is talking about, Mozilla is planning to simply push Electrolysis out to Firefox users as part of a future minor update.

Of course, all this doesn’t mean there won’t be any major Firefox revisions coming in the future. Firefox 4.0 is the next likely milestone and, according to current road maps, should arrive some time early next year.

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File Under: HTML, HTML5, Web Standards
Jan
14
2010

What Comes After HTML5? Just HTML

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The future of the web is fast approaching. HTML5, the successor to today’s HTML 4, the lingua franca of the web, has reached the Last Call stage and is beginning to look like a finished spec. While it will be some time before HTML5 can be called complete, forward-thinking browsers already support much of the spec.

HTML5 represents the biggest leap forward in web standards in almost a decade, but what comes after HTML5? HTML6?

As it happens, no. The WHAT Working Group, which, along with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is helping to create HTML5 and beyond, has already decided to move to a non-versioned development model after the release of HTML5. That means, in the future, there will simply be HTML.

What will this HTML look like you ask? Well, Mark Pilgrim, who works on the WHAT Working Group, has started a new series of posts on the group’s blog entitled What’s Next in HTML?

The answer, at least for now, is a possible new tag: <device>.

As you would expect <device> will offer web developers a way to access devices, for example your PC’s webcam or perhaps your mobile device’s accelerometer.

The obvious application for the device tag is video chat — something currently only possible using proprietary tools like Adobe Flash. As Pilgrim points out in his post, if you combine the existing video tag and web socket tools of HTML5 with the new device tag, all the elements necessary for an online video chat application are in place.

Before web developers get too excited it’s important to realize that <device> is a long, long way from being a real HTML element. As Pilgrim notes: “the entire device API is still in its infancy… nobody has even started implementing a prototype of that piece yet, and the whole idea might be scrapped.”

That shouldn’t be too surprising for those of you following the bleeding edge of the web, after all we’ve already been teased with the promise of a single video codec only to see that vanish.

But with any luck, the device tag won’t suffer a similar fate and one day web developers will be able to take advantage of yet another set of tools that were once the sole province of desktop software.

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File Under: Browsers, Identity
Jan
14
2010

Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox

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Mozilla’s Weave, a free add-on for Firefox that syncs your personal data across multiple PCs and mobile devices, has reached the release candidate stage and is just about ready to make its way into Firefox proper.

The Weave team is hoping to get Weave 1.0 out before Firefox 3.6 arrives, though the add-on will not be integrated into the browser itself until a Firefox future release.

Eventually Firefox will offer built-in syncing and Weave will become just another feature. But for now, at least you’ve got the add-on and an easy way to sync bookmarks, tabs, personas and other Firefox data across all your various computers.

Since the new version of Weave is a release candidate not a whole lot has changed since the last beta release we told you about. According to the announcement post, Weave RC1 offers faster startup times and offers better integration with Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox.

Other changes include some more improvements during syncing, for example, your tabs are now immediately available when you set up a second computer. The new version also fixes an issue that would trigger the Weave master password prompt when you launched Firefox.

Weave 1.0 still isn’t a final release, but in our experience Weave is stable enough for everyday use. If you’d like to give it a try, head over the Mozilla Add-ons page and install Weave. If you’re updating from an earlier release make sure you update all your computers, having different versions of Weave on synced PCs can cause problems.

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File Under: Identity, Security, UI/UX
Jan
13
2010

Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data

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Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, is leading a charge to make privacy settings more explicit to users by creating visual cues in the browser. Raskin’s idea uses a set of small icons to denote the limits of a website’s privacy policy.

Raskin likens the idea to how Firefox (and other browsers) currently handle phishing attack warnings, using visual icons and simple language.

For the active social web user, keeping track of which bits of your data are public and which are private on different sites is a chore. Some websites share your photos, status updates, your list of friends, who you’re following and other data on the open web by default. Some share nothing. The rest are somewhere in the middle.

Part of the problem is the privacy policies themselves. They are complex, mind-numbingly long legal documents. We routinely ignore them, breezing past them by clicking “I agree.” Dangerous behavior, indeed.

Raskin and his supporters have borrowed some ideas from the way Creative Commons licensing works, and the way licensing options are denoted on content sites. Originally, the idea was to create a Creative Commons model for privacy policies — that is, a common, readable, reusable set of policies much like the Creative Commons licenses for content — but that plan was abandoned because policies differ too much from site to site. There’s no easy boilerplate for privacy like there is for content publishing.

But the icon concept remains: A website creates a privacy policy and chooses from a limited set of standard icons that reflect the written policy. Is your profile public by default? Your photos, or status messages? Each setting has its own icon, and the group of settings are indicated by a short stack of icons. The icon set is then detected by the browser and displayed to the user. If there are no icons chosen, the browser offers a warning along the lines of its phishing warning, something like: Be careful, this site might be giving away or selling your data.

Raskin is very clear that, so far, this is a work in progress. There are, as of yet, no icons designed, and the details of how they would be implemented remain vague. Nor has Mozilla made any official announcement that it would support such a system.

However, recent events have proven there’s clearly a need for a standardized, front-and-center privacy notification system. In December, Facebook began a shift towards looser default privacy settings that encourage users to share more of their data. Just last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, noted that people’s notions of privacy on the social web evolve often, and that social web sites will have to continually update their own privacy policies to reflect those changes. As a result, Facebook’s new defaults will offer less privacy. Zuckerberg’s words set off a fierce debate on the topic, with Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb presenting the clearest counterargument that changing social mores should not lead to looser default privacy settings on the social web.

We’ve often said the browser is the most logical place to display identity and privacy information to the user. As people surf from site to site, they should be able to see, at a glance, what level of privacy they’re currently working with. Raskin’s model sounds like a pretty good plan, though implementing it might be a bit more difficult.

One obvious problem: What’s to stop a site from using icons that are totally different than what the written policy actually says? Raskin and crew want the icons to supersede the written policy so, in that scenario, the written policy is trumped by the icons and the user retains their rights. Whether or not an icon can legally trump a written document is something Raskin doesn’t directly address, and, as one commenter points out, the situation gets much more complex when you start considering international legal systems.

If you’ve got ideas or would like to participate in the discussion, head over to Raskin’s blog or sign up for the upcoming privacy workshop hosted at Mozilla on Jan. 27 (see Aza’s post for full details).

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File Under: Events
Jan
12
2010

Google I/O 2010 Registration Is Open

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Google has announced details for the next Google I/O, the company’s largest developer event. It runs May 19 and 20, 2010, at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Registration is $400 now, but the price goes up to $500 a month before the event, so register early. Students and faculty can get in for $100, but you have to act quickly.

I/O is two days of Google’s big ideas. Past events have been the forum for Android’s coming out party, the debut of Google Wave and VP of engineering Vic Gundotra’s epic HTML5 keynote, which showed off everything the HTML5 stack can do in the browser. The excitement has grown to be huge, much like the Stevenotes from many a Macworld past.

Last year, everyone got a free Android touchscreen phone. The official @googleio Twitter account has been pegged with questions about what’s going to be given away this year, but whoever is operating that feed at Google says there are no plans for giveaways at this year’s event.

Of course, if Google was planning on giving away something extra cool, why would it spoil the surprise?

This year’s event is set up much like the previous ones — there’s a big keynote each morning, followed by breakout sessions all day long on a wide variety of tech topics. Some sessions we’re looking forward to: A bunch of stuff about Chrome, like how to use Chrome Frame, how to make extensions and an update on HTML5′s progress. There’s also an intro to using Chrome’s built-in developer tools.

There are a couple of sessions about how to optimize your site for social activity using single sign-on systems and the real-time publishing technology PubSubHubbub.

There are also sessions on all the Data APIs and Google Web Toolkit. Read the full list.

There are also after-hours parties featuring things like drunken tricycle races, and this year there’s a special gadget party for the hardware geeks (and aren’t we all?).

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5, Web Apps
Jan
12
2010

Mozilla Gets Ready to Put Prism on Your Desktop With New Beta Release

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Soon, you’ll be able to pull your favorite website — like Gmail or YouTube — out of the web browser and run it as a stand-alone application on your computer’s desktop. Mozilla has announced that its Prism software, one such technology that makes it easy to run web apps on your desktop, is very close to a final release.

The Prism team is getting ready to push out a third beta release of Prism 1.0, which will include all the changes due to arrive in Firefox 3.6. If you’d like to help out testing Prism, you can download the standalone Prism 1.0b3pre from Prism developer Matt Gertner’s website.

In out testing setting up a Prism app couldn’t be simpler — just plugin the URL, decided whether or not you want to see the URL bar and give your app a name. Prism will then fetch the website’s favicon, turn that into an icon and put the new app in dock, desktop, system menu or anywhere else you want.

If you opt to use the Firefox plugin, Prism gets even easier — just right-click on any webpage and you’ll see an option to turn that page into a stand-alone, Prism app.

Keep in mind this is a beta release (technically a beta pre-release), but in our experience Prism was stable and fast.

Prism faces some stiff competition these days from the likes of Microsoft’s Silverlight, which allows for similar actions, and perhaps more so from Adobe’s AIR platform, which has gotten a boost in popularity since it’s become the platform of choice for the popular stand-alone Twitter clients Seesmic Desktop, Twhirl, and Tweetdeck.

But while AIR and Silverlight both require proprietary tools to build and run applications, Prism uses the same open-source foundations you’ll find in Firefox.

Perhaps Prism’s closest competitor is FluidApp, which is more or less the same thing, but uses WebKit to render web apps. Although it became life as a proprietary project, Fluid went open source at the end of 2009.

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File Under: Browsers, Software
Jan
11
2010

Firefox Without Add-ons? Say it Ain’t So

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If you want to know what a chorus of angry Firefox users sounds like, just make them think you’re taking away their browser add-ons.

A blog post from Mozilla’s Mike Connor, one of the company’s key browser developers, made waves Saturday and Sunday in the Firefox world for suggesting that scenario. While Connor didn’t explicitly say it would happen, his words led many readers to assume the company was considering abandoning the current Firefox add-on ecosystem in favor of JetPack-based add-ons

We asked Mozilla about this possibility and the representative we spoke to insists it’s certainly not the case. Connor’s post has been updated and much of the hubbub has settled down, but the post did spark an important discussion about browser add-ons and the relationships users have with them.

Connor’s post outlined a few lines of thought that have been going on behind the scenes among Firefox developers, as they have been strategizing about the browser’s future.

Exactly what Connor intended to say is still a little unclear. The initial post used phrases like “deprecating the old systems” and suggested that Mozilla would be “discriminating against the old systems” — that is, the current Firefox add-on ecosystem we all know and love — as it moves forward with its software releases.It certainly sounded like somebody at Mozilla was talking about killing off add-ons as we know them and replacing them with the still-beta JetPack add-on system and the Personas theming system. JetPack is Mozilla’s platform for creating simple add-ons that manipulate web page elements and UI elements within the browser’s skin, much like Greasemonkey scripts or the type of DOM-futzing that Chrome’s extension system allows. Personas, Mozilla’s theme manager, allows users to alter the look of the browser by installing a visual theme with one click.

Once a rather vocal community began reacting to the post (read the comments) Conner added an update that backpedaled a bit, but still concluded that, while the plan might be not be “set in stone,” Mozilla does intend to move in that direction. When he said that Mozilla was “discriminating against the old systems,” and added “I am personally at peace with that,” Conner was essentially throwing down the geek gauntlet, whether he meant to or not.

To understand why those statements caused an uproar, you must first understand that, as it stands, JetPack is full-fledged Firefox add-ons what Mini Me is to Dr. Evil — a cute but much less powerful sidekick.

JetPack makes it simple to build simple things, but in its current incarnation it could hardly produce a NoScript, an AdBlock Plus or any of the other popular, powerful Firefox extensions.

Presumably, long before Mozilla makes an attempt to officially migrate from the current system to the JetPack system, the company isn’t likely to turn its back on the over 5,000 add-ons currently shipping for Firefox.

But Conner’s post had an element of immediacy to it and that quickly brought out the die-hard Firefox add-on fans writing “over my dead body” and threatening to abandon Firefox in favor of Google Chrome (ironically, when we recently critiqued Chrome’s current add-on plan, we did so because it fails to offer developers exactly the tools that Conner is suggesting Mozilla might eventually take away).

Why would Mozilla want to limit developers? Well, the truth is that’s not at all what JetPack is aiming to do.

In fact, the JetPack program is an attempt to make developers’ lives easier. JetPack offers niceties like stable APIs (so new versions of Firefox won’t break all your add-ons), automatic updates, sandboxed add-ons for a more secure browser and process isolation so add-ons won’t crash Firefox.

But of course simplicity comes with a price, and this is where Conner runs afoul of the nerds.

To many, the power of Firefox is precisely in its infinite extensibility. Does infinite power bring infinite possibilities for problems? Yes, but the tradeoff is worth it, so say Firefox’s die-hard add-on users.

It’s precisely the fact that users can do whatever they want within the browser that has elevated Firefox to where it is today. Outside developers have been able to push the envelope the web browser’s capabilities, extending it to do things that even the founders of Mozilla would likely never have imagined.

The real issue might simply be whether or not Mozilla recognizes this. Writing about the reasons why Mozilla wants to eventually switch to JetPack-based add-ons Conner talks about updates and problems with add-ons. “We already know from our users,” he writes, “that incompatible add-ons are a significant factor in opting out of updates.”

The message here is not that the add-on system needs to be changed so that people will have a cleaner upgrade path for their browser, but that the browser is irrelevant and the add-ons are what matter.

Firefox, Chrome and Safari routinely swap the top spot in speed tests, and the browsers match each other pretty closely in feature breakdowns, including Firefox’s once-unique core strength — support for the latest web standards.

But there is one huge difference that sets Firefox apart — the ability to infinitely extend it through add-ons. Take away the full power of add-ons and Firefox is just another browser. It might be easier to keep up-to-date since you wouldn’t have to worry about compatibility, but there wouldn’t be anything too special about it, functionality wise.

However, despite some perhaps poor wording in Conner’s post, Mozilla is not about to abandon traditional add-ons. Will many developers chose to port their add-ons to the JetPack system? We hope so. It makes it much easier to develop and maintain simple add-ons. But for the more powerful add-ons, Mozilla will likely leave existing frameworks in place for some time.

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