I’ve been an avid user of Mozilla Jetpack – the next generation of add-on technology – since about May of 2009 when the project was first made public. I speculated as recently as November that Jetpack could spell the end for traditional Mozilla Firefox add-ons, it’s not clear yet if I was entirely wrong.
Jetpack is set for inclusion in the Firefox 3.7 release later this year and with that has come all kinds of speculation about the fate of add-ons and where that leaves the millions of users of today’s add-ons. Long story short, Mozilla is not in the habit of ever leaving its users behind and add-ons are no exception.
“Jetpack tries to make everything about Add-ons easier, from how they’re
developed to how they’re installed and managed,” Mozilla staffers wrote in a blog post.”If Jetpack becomes just
as functional and powerful as the existing system, then we’ll talk
about whether migrating all extensions to the new platform makes sense.
It’s far too early to have that discussion in earnest now, and to be
clear, no decision has been made about deprecating the existing system.”
