August 11th, 2009 Mozilla Labs has launched a new project called Jetpack to explore new ways to extend & personalize the Web. Jetpack is an open source project to enhance the browser, 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.
In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know like HTML, CSS and Javascript etc.
It enables developers to create code packages that can be toggled on and off without the end user having to restart their browser. This is something that cannot be done with Firefox’s current add-ons system, but has been possible in third-party tools such as Greasemonkey, which allow users to pick and choose which scripts are active.
Besides no restarts and no breaking with updates, the most exciting aspect of Jetpack is how it can give users more control over what they see on a site, and how they can interact with its content. Like Ubiquity (another Mozilla Labs project), it also appears to be putting these add-ons right in the hands of users as soon as they visit a site with Jetpack controls, which means there’s less of a need to promote it in an add-ons directory to have users find it.
