Mozilla Labs Jetpack SDK 0.4 Is Here

Mozilla Labs announced its fourth in a regular series of releases for their open source Jetpack SDK.

Jetpack is a development environment for building Firefox add-ons using common web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

While Jetpack may not replace XUL, the current add-on development environment, that is the goal of the project.

"The intent of the Jetpack SDK is to provide enough APIs to enable the majority of functionality that existing add-ons require," Jetpack FAQ says. "If the Jetpack API doesn't provide the flexibility or feature you need, you'll be able to write your own module to add that capability."

Add-on developers using XUL are going to be encouraged to port their code to the web-based Jetpack SDK.

The newest Jetpack adds four "high-level" API's.

The page worker API makes it possible to for add-ons to create a hidden permanent frame that can load and access web pages.

The widget API offers a visually consistent way for add-ons to show themselves in the browser and interact with users.

To store persistent data that survives restarts Jetpack now has a simple storage API.

And, there's a private browsing API so add-on developers can detect the status of private browsing.

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