Unless you’re hiding under a rock, you are probably aware that the Mozilla Project has released Firefox 21 today. Additionally, unless you’ve been completely ignoring my recent posts on this blog, you might also realize that Firefox 21 signals a new chapter in the life of the Jetpack project, as we ship the SDK’s module loader and APIs in Firefox 21.

To me this is a big deal, for add-on developers, for Firefox developers, for the entire project. I’d like to thank everyone involved for all the hard work, but in particular there are a few people who deserve special mention:

• Atul Varma & Aza Raskin started Jetpack in 2009 in Mozilla Labs, then rebooted it in 2010, ushering in the modern era of content scripts, CommonJS modules the command-line cfx tool and Add-on Builder.
• Dietrich Ayala, David Mason, Myk Melez & Brian Warner who guided the project through the ‘re-boot’ phase, always with an eye to landing Jetpack’s capabilities in Firefox and revolutionizing how Firefox features are made.
• Dave Townsend, Irakli Gozalishvili and the rest of the current Jetpack team who have done a ton of work coordinating a series of important changes to make the SDK fit nicely into mozilla-central.
• Various Mozilla Labs engineers including Shane Caraveo, Anant Narayanan, Andrew Sutherland & David Ascher who kicked the tires and built prototyped their own crazy ideas based on our shaky prototypes and beta releases.
• Our fantastic contributors who keep showing up with great code for new features and bug fixes.

Now that we ship with Firefox I have decided to dial back the frequency of these posts to every 6 weeks on uplift and instead highlight for developers the new features and bug fixes that have landed in the recent Nightly cycle. As always if you have questions, feedback or want to get involved you can find us on the wiki, on the email list and of course in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 505
• Bugs created last week: 15
• Bugs fixed last week: 13
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,809
• Open pull requests on Github: 54

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-05-14 10:39:08 PDT

This week I’d like to tease some of the new stuff we’re working on. We’re excited to be implementing some new APIs that allow developers to add buttons and other common UI elements to the Firefox navigation bar. Based on Matteo’s JEP, here is an example of how this would work:

const { Button } = require("sdk/button");
 
// Minimal "action" button, default icon, 16x16
let actionButton = Button({
    id: "my-button",
    label: "My Button"
});
 
actionButton.on("click", function() {
    // do something when the button is clicked
});

This work is linked to a huge effort on the part of the Firefox team to deliver a refresh of Firefox’s look and feel called ‘Australis’ in Firefox 24.

Next up, we’re also excited to bring more of the web into add-on development. Irakli and Eddy have been working on a simple way to import DOM apis and use them in your add-on. Here’s a small example to illustrate how we expect this to work:

let { window } = require("sdk/addon/window");
let exampleSocket = new window.WebSocket(
    "ws://www.example.com/socketserver", 
    ["protocolOne", "protocolTwo"]
);

If you have any feedback on this or other upcoming work, we’d love to hear from you, either in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org or via the Jetpack mailing list.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 521
• Bugs created last week: 25
• Bugs fixed last week: 11
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,751
• Open pull requests on Github: 53

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-04-23 08:42:09 PDT

Meeting Brief

• High Priority work: Last private browsing changes need to be uplifted, cross-domain content script support is landed on the platform but needs an owner for the JS side.
• Roundtable: we’ll start flagging good first bugs in triage, dcamp had some questions about loader internals.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-04-23#Minutes

After last Tuesday’s release of Add-on SDK 1.14, we updated you on Wednesday about changes in console.log behaviour, and then again on Thursday once we’d updated the AMO Validator and Add-on Builder sites to correctly support SDK 1.14. The current status is that we’re tracking a bug in the AMO validator which produces two erroneous warnings from add-ons packed with SDK 1.14. We expect the validator will be updated to fix this on Thursday afternoon ( PST ).

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 506
• Bugs created last week: 45
• Bugs fixed last week: 24
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,696
• Open pull requests on Github: 47

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-04-02 11:39:07 PDT

Meeting Brief

• High priority: Irakli is closing out Panels support for Fx22, cross-domain work is moving ahead, other items are on track.
• SDK: Wes proposes new Firefox-version-centric tagging scheme for > 1.14.
• Roundtable: dcamp is changing the devtools to use Jetpack’s loader, is looking for alternatives to his chrome url hack

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-04-02#Minutes

The one caveat with using Add-on Builder with SDK 1.14 is that the behaviour of console.log changed. If you rely on the Error Console window to view messages from console.log, you have two options:

1. Change all calls to console.log to console.error, which will print out scary looking red messages in the Error Console’s ‘Errors’ tab
2. Follow the instructions detailed in my blog post from yesterday to ensure that any calls in your add-on code to appear as they previously did in the ‘Messages’ tab of the Error Console window.

We’ve logged a bug to improve this experience via an update to the Add-on Builder Helper add-on so this will not be an issue in the future.

The Jetpack team released Add-on SDK 1.14 a few hours ago! This is a huge step on our journey towards integrating Jetpack with Firefox.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 496
• Bugs created last week: 48
• Bugs fixed last week: 38
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,678
• Open pull requests on Github: 42

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-03-26 09:31:12 PDT

Meeting Brief

• High Priority work: need to scope further PWPB work, gabor has nearly landed cross-domain content script support, panel positioning looks good to land this week, and discussion of next quarters batch of high-priority work.
• SDK: we’re shipping software, also the tree is orange! On different branches, thankfully.
• Roundtable: discussion on how to handle target releases for cfx vs the SDK apis now that we’ve landed. Looks like we should create a ‘cfx’ bug component.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-03-26#Minutes

As I’ve written previously, SDK 1.14 will be the last release of the SDK to include the SDK APIs. Once Firefox 21 ships the version of Firefox you are using will always have the latest and greatest version of the SDK apis. What is more, add-ons packed with Add-on SDK 1.14 will always prefer the APIs embedded in Firefox if they exist, providing a forward-compatibility benefit to developers.

We are working to update Add-on Builder and the Add-on validator on AMO within the next couple of days so that they properly support 1.14. I’ll update the mailing list and twitter once this work has been completed.

What’s new?

• Initial support for Per-window Private Browsing. Firefox 20 replaces the existing private browsing ‘mode’ with an new feature that allows users to open private windows. A significant amount of work has been done to make this work for SDK-based add-ons.
• Unique tab ids on both Android and Desktop Firefox, for easier tracking of specific tabs.

You’ll find much more detail about SDK 1.14 in the release notes.

Some interesting stats about this release ( from the Github history between the 1.13.2 & 1.14 tags ):

• 329 changes in 117 pull requests between tags 1.13.2 and 1.14
• Special thanks to our community contributors Brett Zamir, Cykesiopka, Dan Stevens, Dương, H. Nguyễn, Gregg Lind, Marc Chevrier and slash_at_ac.auone-net.jp

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

• Over the last couple of days I’ve published a couple of posts about the near future of the project as we land the SDK’s apis in Firefox: [part 1] & [part 2]. If you have any feedback on these posts, please comment there, below, or ideally post to the Google group.
• We took a hard look at the work we need to ship in SDK 1.14 and decided that, given there is also a team work week coming up the best thing to do is to delay release by 2 weeks. This means that Add-on SDK 1.14 will be released on Tuesday, March 26th.
• Mozillian / Hacker Blake Winton created Whimsy ( code here ), a crazy little Jetpack that adds fun, zany stuff to Firefox, in particular the newtab page.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 475
• Bugs created last week: 43
• Bugs fixed last week: 13
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,532
• Open pull requests on Github: 33

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate, please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-02-26 10:08:05 PST

Meeting Brief

• High priority work: Jetpack has landed! PWPB needs your help, ask Erik!
• SDK: 1.14 has been pushed back a couple weeks to catch all the changes needed, and allow for team meetup travel.
• Roundtable: discussion around squashing commits in to understandable chunks, Eddy’s blog posts, and what to expect for the work week.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-02-26#Minutes

• We released Add-on SDK 1.13.2 earlier today to address a number of issues with previous 1.13 releases. If you were holding out on re-packing your add-on with the latest and greatest, please do so as soon as possible!
• On a related note, we got 1.13.2 out so fast, both the Add-on Builder and the AMO Validator will not support SDK 1.13.2 until later this week.
• Erik Vold whipped up a cool new module for blocking content, and even wrote an example add-on that uses this module to ( you guessed it! ) block some content.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 445
• Bugs created last week: 35
• Bugs fixed last week: 26
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,482
• Open pull requests on Github: 33

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-02-12 09:06:45 PST

Meeting Brief

• High Priority work: apis are landed, working on Py CFX & loader patches to support the new layout, patched and shipped a Memshrink bug and still slugging away at the rest of the list.
• SDK: shipping 1.13.2 later today, as well as 1.14b2.
• Roundtable: possible weirdness on tpbl due to the Fedora -> Ubuntu switch, looking into getting Fennec tests running as well as an alternative to unsafeWindow, and looking for creative ideas for GSOC projects.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-02-12#Minutes

• Opening and closing browser windows seems to add FragmentOrElement objects to the CC graph when Addon SDK addons are installed which add an addonbar widget. (Bug 833783)
• Context-menu reuses the same worker when a page navigates to a new location (Bug 839271)
• Context-menu overflows depending on the total number of menu items regardless of whether they are hidden or not. (Bug 839318)
• Context-menu overflow menu can become completely hidden. (Bug 839321)
• Returning undefined from a context listener in a contentScript should hide the menu. (Bug 839814)
• Context-menu doesn’t emit “click” event. (Bug 839872)

You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format. As well, Addon-SDK SDK 1.13.2 support will be added to the Add-on Builder and the AMO Validator in the next day or so.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

We’re now a big step closer to shipping the SDK APIs with Firefox and other apps, we’ve uplifted the SDK code from our git repository to mozilla-inbound and assuming it sticks we will be on the trains for releasing. We’ll be doing weekly uplifts to keep the code in mozilla-central current.

The Add-on SDK is now in Firefox! ( oxymoronical.com )

So what did we actually do? Well, over the last few months we have made a few changes to the SDK to make it fit better into Mozilla’s mercurial repository, to run tests the way our IT and QA teams expect, and to ensure that the SDK’s apis can be used in any add-on code. We’ve been doing a lot of this integration work on the ‘larch’ branch, and today Dave merged from larch to mozilla-inbound. If all goes well in a little under 3 weeks this code will get uplifted to the Aurora channel, and 3 weeks after that the same code-base will get released as Add-on SDK 1.14, the last release of the SDK that will include the APIs.

I will post a more detailed plan of what the process will be as we transition to shipping the APIs in Firefox and decouple our docs and tool releases from the train model. In the meantime, I’d like to thank the entire community who have contributed to Jetpack over the years for their support, bugs, patience and code.

Cheers!