Article by George Norman

On 12 Jun 2009

Late last month we were reporting the fact that Mozilla Labs launched a new project meant to explore new ways to extend and personalize the internet called Jetpack. Mozilla Labs is now announcing the release of Jetpack 0.2, an update that it deemed “major.”

Here is what we already know about Jetpack. It is an API (application programming interface) that lets you to use the web technologies you are already familiar with and write Firefox add-ons. It is also a platform for experimenting with Firefox add-ons.


Version 0.1 of Jetpack came with the following features:
- APIs with status bar, tabs, content-script, animations support.
- External API libraries support.
- jQuery support.
- Bespin integrated development environment.
- Firebug inline debugging.

The updated Jetpack 0.2 version comes with a few extras:
Slidebars: a new take on the old sidebars that let the use seamlessly access all sorts of temporary and permanent info. You can use Slidebars to watch a video while surfing the web for example; or you could use Slidebars to access streams of info, such as Facebook or Twitter.
Jetpack.future: according to Atul Vama and Aza Raskin from the Jetpack development team, jetpack.future is actually two things rolled into one. “It is a platform for experimentation and it is also a solid set of APIs that anyone to easily build new Firefox features. To enable Jetpack to be both stable and — at the same time — to experiment with not-quite-yet-ready features we’ve added the ability to import new features from the “future”. Slidebars, for example, are still highly experimental. To use them, you need to import them from the future first,” the two explained.
Persistent storage and clipboard support: the feature adds simple storage support to the future module, just as requested by numerous Jetpack testers.

If you would like to get Jetpack 0.2, a download location is available here.
For additional details on Jetpack, you can visit the official web page here.

In related news, Mozilla recently rolled out a redesigned version of the Firefox add-ons official web page and gave it a new feature called Add-on Collections (detailed article here).



Tags: Mozilla, Jetpack

I Hope you LIKE this blog post! Thank you!

What do YOU have to say about this

Popular News

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.