The release of Jetpack SDK 0.4 by Mozilla had been a breath of fresh air to many firefox add-on developers. The powerful features adopted and built into the SDK makes the future add-ons work more seamlessly and faster than what we are seeing at present.
Add-on development gets an add-on for itself, as four additional high-level APIs are integrated into the SDK enabling simple and powerful add-on development.
- Page Worker – Using this, add-ons can create a permanent and invisible frame in order to load and access web pages.
- Widget – A powerful way using which add-ons can be at the disposal of the users providing an advanced interaction.
- Simple Storage – Now add-ons can store persistent information across multiple application restarts.
- Private Browsing – The add-ons i interact with the Firefox’s private browsing feature and be aware of when the user has chosen private browsing to be enabled.
In addition to the new high-level APIs, this version also features two major architectural improvements:
- Restartless Add-ons – Add-on bundles created by the SDK can be installed into nightly testing builds of the next version of Firefox without requiring users to restart the application.
- Unforgeable ID – Each add-on bundle created by the SDK is given a cryptographic identifier that specifies its origin in an unforgeable manner, so Firefox can verify that an update to an add-on is provided by the same source as provided its original version.
The time spent in waiting for this major release is now worth spent. We can expect advanced add-ons in the near future to make our browsing experience fruitful and easy.
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