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28 May 2010, 11:21

Firefox's Jetpack SDK boosted to 0.4

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The Mozilla Labs developers have announced Jetpack SDK 0.4, the latest update to the development kit for the Jetpack framework that is pencilled in as the medium term replacement for Firefox's existing extension mechanisms. Current Firefox extensions are tightly bound to the Firefox browser and written in non-web languages, whereas Jetpack is based around JavaScript, HTML and CSS, with JavaScript based APIs exposing the browser's underlying functionality.

The new version includes four new APIs and a pair of new features. The page-worker API allows for add-ons to create their own invisible frame to load and access web pages while the new widget API provides a consistent way for add-ons to show themselves for user interaction. simple-storage is a new API for saving data locally and between application restarts and private-browsing lets add-ons detect if the user is using Firefox's private browsing features. These new APIs are complemented by the two new features, restart-less add-ons, which allow add-ons to be installed into the latest nightly testing builds of Firefox and an "Unforgeable ID" for add-ons cryptographically created by the SDK, which will allow Firefox to verify updates came from the same source as the original version.

A detailed change log and the SDK are available from the Jetpack 0.4 release notes wiki page.

(djwm)

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