Blast Off: Mozilla Adds Jetpack To Firefox

Never content to stand still in the market, Mozilla Labs, the maker of the open-source Web browser Firefox, has launched a new community initiative called Jetpack aimed at expanding its already considerable extensions ecosystem.

The move from Mozilla may come in response to Google's plan to build out its Chrome Web browsers extensions.

To that end, Jetpack, which launched yesterday, is an API that looks to tap into Mozilla's active and vocal developer community by making it easier to build extensions.

Additionally, the makers of Firefox hope to attract new development talent to the browser by taking advantage of existing Web technologies that many regular Internet users are already familiar with.

"We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack features can be written in under a dozen lines of code," Aza Raskin, Atul Varma and Nick Nguyen wrote in the Mozilla Labs blog.

Specifically, the Jetpack API will use HTML, CSS and JavaScript primarily, letting anyone with some relatively basic Web development skills participate in the Mozilla Labs project. As an added bonus, add-ons created with Jetpack won't require the browser or computer they are running on to restart before the changes take effect. That means less disruption to the Web browsing experience, the company said.

But Mozilla does caution that this roll out of the Jetpack API is still in its initial configuration.

"This is a 0.1 release, so it is unpolished, unfinished and still highly prototyped. We are planning on entirely revamping things for the next iterations within the coming days and weeks," wrote the Jetpack team.

Developers interested in building add-ons for Mozilla's Firefox through the new community initiative can download the Jetpack API and get started now.

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