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Netstat -vat by Sean Michael Kerner (bio)

A command line view of IT



Mozilla Jetpack Won't Toast Add-Ons

By Sean Michael Kerner on January 12, 2010 1:08 PM
jetpack_smaller.jpg
From the 'Rocket Powered Add-ons' files:

I've been an avid user of Mozilla Jetpack - the next generation of add-on technology - since about May of 2009 when the project was first made public. I speculated as recently as November that Jetpack could spell the end for traditional Mozilla Firefox add-ons, it's not clear yet if I was entirely wrong.

Jetpack is set for inclusion in the Firefox 3.7 release later this year and with that has come all kinds of speculation about the fate of add-ons and where that leaves the millions of users of today's add-ons. Long story short, Mozilla is not in the habit of ever leaving its users behind and add-ons are no exception.
"Jetpack tries to make everything about Add-ons easier, from how they're developed to how they're installed and managed," Mozilla staffers wrote in a blog post."If Jetpack becomes just as functional and powerful as the existing system, then we'll talk about whether migrating all extensions to the new platform makes sense. It's far too early to have that discussion in earnest now, and to be clear, no decision has been made about deprecating the existing system."

So what that means to me is a dual system of jetpacks and add-ons for the foreseeable future - which is just fine by me. I use both Jetpacks and regular add-ons everyday.

From a user point of view, it might be a good idea to have some kind of unified directory, making it easier to find extensions.

From a developer's point of view, it is easier (at least for a low grade hack like me) to build an add-on for Jetpack than a regular add-on (no XUL required). Having both is the best of both worlds and provides Firefox users with an un-matched breadth of extensibility that puts all other browsers to shame.

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1 Comments

Bjartur Thorlacius said:

Having both is the best of both worlds and provides Firefox users with an un-matched breadth of extensibility that puts all other browsers to shame.
What about Opera?

I haven't touched that thing for ages, it's closed source and never installed it on my machine -- but I'm quite sure it at least supports userscripts and a subset of W3C Widgets. May not be as good as Firefoxs' but should at least be given consideration. Jetpack seems just to be userscripts on steroids.

Did you see that? Standardized widgets? Cross-browser extensions, if that ain't cool, tell me what is. IMO these 90% market-share browsers that seek popularity among the masses should all support ECMAScript and W3C widget extensions, so one could write simple stuff that worked across browsers. Bookmarklets are a hack and only make sense for a few very specialized cases.

January 25, 2010 3:55 PM

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