Jetpack Gallery Now Live : Mozilla Labs

I was recently at a Hackfest conducted by IIT Madras, during Shaastra ’09. During the Hackfest I was taught how to develop Jetpacks, a project by Mozilla Labs. The Aim of Jetpacks is to make Addon development for Firefox a lot more simpler than what it already is now.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

For those of you not aware with Jetpack is all about. Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project that enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create powerful Firefox addons. The goal of Jetpacks is to allow anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Jetpack Gallery is for Jetpacks in the same way as Mozilla Addons is for Firefox. Till today people installing Jetpacks had to either depend on the Wiki page maintained by Mozilla. However with the launch of the Gallery the floodgates have been opened and I expect to see some interesting uses of Jetpacks in the days to come.

Want an example of what Jetpack can actually accomplish?

• Adblock Plus the immensely popular addon for Firefox : ~25,000 Lines of Code
• Unad a Jetpack that does the same thing : ~80 Lines of Code

That translates into roughly 99% savings. Now would you were a developer what would you choose?

As of now I guess Mozilla is approving each Jetpack on an individual basis considering that Jetpacks are still in the experimental state and not ready for the real world yet. But the true power of Jetpack in my opinion lies in the fact that Addons are installed without the need for a restart of Firefox.

So those of you waiting for addons without a reboot, Jetpack is the best you can get right now. Head over to the Gallery to install the Jetpack add-on and try out some Jetpacks like JetWave (a Google Wave Notifier) and JetStatus (a Twitter client).

Jetpack Gallery | Jetpack ‘ Mozilla Labs