May20'09

Introducing Jetpack, Call for Participation

Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web.

This post has been superseded by the launch of the Jetpack SDK.

The add-ons community for Firefox is arguably one of the largest, most vibrant sources for innovation on the Web today. If you want to affect people, to reach them and make a difference in their daily lives, the Firefox add-ons platform is hard to beat, with over one billion installs of Firefox add-ons to date.

However, we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Jetpack, a Mozilla Labs project to explore new ways to extend & personalize the Web.

In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.

With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. 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 Feature’s can be written in under a dozen lines of code.

Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Most importantly, from a user perspective, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to the browser without a restart or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience.

As with all Mozilla Labs initiatives, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development & experimentation.

Initial Release

This is a 0.1 release, so it unpolished, unfinished, and still highly prototyped. We are planning on entirely revamping things for the next iterations within the coming days and weeks. We need your feedback, both on the particulars as well as the direction. In particular, we are actively seeking feedback on the API design.

v0.1 – May 2009
- Initial Jetpack APIs with support for statusbars, tabs, content-scripts, animations, and more.
- Support for external API libraries (e.g. Twitter)
- jQuery support
- Integrated development environment with Bespin, with immediate installs and a fast development cycle
- Inline debugging with Firebug
- This initial release of the Jetpack API does not include a fully formed security model. It is being released for testing, development, and feedback.

Getting Started with Jetpack

Install and play around with the initial Jetpack API and demos
Take the Jetpack Tutorial (although it is better to follow it inside of Jetpack, where you can edit and run the examples live)
Jetpack Demos, and more demos.

Developing Jetpack Features with Bespin

Other Resources

Get Involved

Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Jetpack experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved: