Author: Mark Long (News Factor)
Mozilla Labs has launched a new browser project that promises to give developers the ability to explore new ways to help Web-site visitors customize and personalize the surfing experience.
Featuring support for status bars, tabs, content scripts, and animations, Jetpack is an application programming interface (API) for enabling Web designers to write browser add-ons using technologies they already know, such as HTML, CSS and Javascript. The goal is to allow “anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play,” said members of the Jetpack development team in a blog.
From the user perspective, Jetpack should enable new features to be added to Firefox without requiring Web surfers to restart the browser or have to deal with add-on compatibility issues. “Like the rest of the Web, Jetpack features are just user apps, so they are immediately available in the browser window without restarting,” said Aza Raskin at Mozilla Labs.
Not a Browser Game Changer
Though Gartner Research Director Ray Valdes doesn’t think Jetpack is a browser game changer, he does see it as allowing Mozilla to build on its strengths. “It helps the Firefox browser leverage its community of developers and extend that because it makes it easier to customize the browser and create small focused solutions for very specific scenarios,” Valdes said.
For example, Jetpack will make it easier and quicker for developers to extend the Firefox browser’s utility over a wider range of uses, Valdes observed. “It remains to be seen what kind of creative things that developers will do with it, but it reduces the learning curve,” Valdes said.
Another likely attraction of Jetpack is the power it potentially has to disrupt the Web’s current status quo. For example, Raskin shows in an online video how easy it can be to build a Jetpack app for switching off Flash videos and other unwanted scripts, images and iframes embedded into Web pages.
The Jetpack app for Firefox creates a little widget that is added to the status bar and when users click it, it turns embedded content on and off, Raskin explained. “And let’s say we want to have all embeds always removed by default,” he said. “The cool thing” is that the new Jetpack widget “works across all browser windows,” Raskin added.
Risky Business
Beyond potentially incurring the ire of Web-based advertisers, the biggest issue that Jetpack must face is how to deal with security issues. “There is a risk because it is a new technology and may open another avenue for security vulnerabilities,” Valdes said. Though Jetpack’s development will certainly pay attention to this issue, “nevertheless the bad guys could try to take advantage of it.”
Jetpack’s developers admit their initial 0.1 release is relatively unpolished. Right now, they say, they want to receive comments on the overall direction of the effort. “In particular, we are actively seeking feedback on the API design,” they said.
Going forward, however, Jetpack’s development team plans to entirely revamp the APIs. The overall goal, they said, is to make Firefox add-on creation “much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation.”
JetPack Bring Customized Experience to FirefoxTags: Browser API, Firefox, JetPack, Mozilla Labs
