Firefox Add-ons Blast Off With ‘JetPack’
Browser add-ons are unquestionably a huge part of Firefox’s success. Unfortunately, building add-ons isn’t for everyone, but that’s something Mozilla is hoping to change with a new Labs project named JetPack.
JetPack is a brand new experimental way of extending Firefox. Because it uses simple tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, anyone who can build a website should be able to create something with JetPack.
Using JetPack is also dead simple for end users — there’s no need to restart Firefox when installing JetPack add-ons, and JetPack add-ons will be compatible across multiple versions of Firefox. Because the tools JetPack offers — namely an API — are backed into Firefox, any browser updates won’t affect the JetPack add-ons.
So how does JetPack work? At its most basic level JetPack offers an API that can be used to send HTML and JavaScript commands to the browser. Much of the UI is handled behind the scenes, so creating a JetPack add-on requires very little code, and the code it does require is simple.
Just because the commands are simple doesn’t mean JetPack can’t be powerful. In fact, Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, has created a very nice video that walks you through the steps of creating a JetPack add-on that duplicates much of functionality found in the Ad Block Plus add-on with just a dozen lines of code.
Mozilla Labs Jetpack - Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
For the initial release, the Jetpack APIs allow you to interact with Firefox widgets like statusbars, tabs, content-scripts and animations. There’s also built-in support for using the jQuery JavaScript library.
The other interesting element of JetPack is its ability to interact with other web services and APIs. For example, your JetPack app could pass queries to the Twitter API to return real-time results for a specific query, or perhaps pull in and do something with recent Flickr images.
In short, JetPack takes much of the power of the Firefox add-on system and mixes it together with the web, all without requiring you to learn a new programming language.
What’s not to love? At the moment, it’s a very early release, so the APIs may well change significantly before the final release. The release announcement also cautions that the Jetpack API “does not include a fully formed security model… it is being released for testing, development, and feedback.”
With that in mind, if you’d like to play around with JetPack, head over to the new JetPack site at Mozilla Labs to download and install JetPack. There’s also nice looking tutorial to help you get started building your first JetPack add-on.
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