I’ve had an interest in the Mozilla Jetpack effort for about a year now. It’s a project that will eventually represent the next generation of add-on extension technology for Firefox.
It’s also a project that has undergone some change recently as the project shifts to an SDK that that has recently hit version 0.3.
The big new item in the 0.3 Jetpack SDK is a context menu API which is one of the cooler things I’ve seen yet out of Jetpack.
“The context-menu API lets add-ons add items to the context menu for
web pages, so add-ons can give users additional options when they
context-click on elements in pages (links, images, etc.) or the pages
themselves,” Mozilla developer Myk Melez blogged.
Mozilla staffer Daniel Buchner has put up a post on how the context menu API can be leveraged to build a menu that will let users launch a web image editing tool. I personally can see a whole lot of opportunities where this API can be easily leveraged.
While the ability to add context menus to a side (or an operating system
even) is hardly a new concept, with Jetpack it now becomes (in my
opinion) trivially easy to build.
Work is still ongoing for Jetpack with a 0.4 SDK release in the works. Frankly I can hardly wait until this tech finally gets baked into a mainstream Firefox release so that it gets the full attention it deserves.
