Mozilla Wants Jetpack To Turbocharge Firefox

Here's one more problem for Microsoft to worry about as it contends with security issues around Internet Explorer 6: Rival Mozilla is launching a serious initiative that could steal away more developer interest for its Firefox platform.

Firefox has been on a roll, perhaps against its toughest competition ever, and over the past two years has seen its market share grow from 16.5 percent of the browser space to 25 percent, according to Net Applications' statistics.

Firefox's share has grown despite serious competition from Apple with its Safari browser, from Google with its Chrome browser, and even from Microsoft, after it patched prelaunch problems in its Internet Explorer 8 and got it out the door to the public. (We'll see how that may change after the security issues surrounding Internet Explorer 6.) Firefox's share has continued to grow even as use models push more Web access to handheld smartphones, and even non-PC gaming consoles.

So now, Mozilla, the organization that develops Firefox, is taking what looks like a huge step to accelerate its momentum. It has unveiled an initiative, called Jetpack, that provides a new set of tools for developers to build add-ons to the browser using common Web building blocks like HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Writes Mozilla's Jetpack development team: "In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the Web technologies you already know."

Remember what happened to Apple's iTunes App Store and iPhone platform after it tools and a marketplace for developers became broadly available? Mozilla is taking a giant step toward giving its open-source browser technology that kind of a boost.

The Jetpack guys also say this:

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 less than a dozen lines of code.

Less code, less work, more bang for the buck from the developer side -- all could be powerful for solution providers if Mozilla executes on this goal.