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

Help out Jetpack by using Stack Overflow! You may not be aware, but one of the most common sites where people ask questions about the Add-on SDK is actually on Stackoverflow.com. Questions are marked with the [firefox-addon-sdk] tag, and several new ones appear each week. While you are there, you should also check out the many questions tagged with [firefox-addon] as well. If you’ve got questions about add-on development yourself or don’t mind helping others, Stack Overflow is a great place to contribute.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 522
• Bugs created last week: 45
• Bugs fixed last week: 19
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,706
• Open pull requests on Github: 48

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 2013-04-09 08:23:50 PDT

Meeting Brief

• we’ve landed the final work to make Panels work with per-Window private browsing, to be released in Firefox 22.
• we’re close to landing platform support for cross-domain xhr in content scripts
• the Firefox team dropped by to talk about collaborating on new Add-on friendly features in Australis.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-04-09#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.

In 1.14 we added some additional features to the console API and also set the default log level to “error” instead of “info” for add-ons installed into Firefox via the Add-on Manager and Add-on Builder Helper as well as tools like the Extension Auto-installer.

An unfortunate side-effect is that by default, developers using these tools will no longer see messages from console.log() in the jsconsole window.

We have provided the ability for developers to set preferences to control logging behavior both globally and for a specific add-on, and by setting one of these preferences you can override the default.

Logging levels

The console module now defines a range of logging levels:

1. all: log calls to any console method
2. debug: log calls to debug(), log(), info(), warn(), error()
3. info: log calls to log(), info(), warn(), error()
4. warn: log calls to warn() and error()
5. error: log calls to error()
6. off: log nothing

New Preferences

We have defined two new preferences, which set the logging level either globally for all SDK add-ons, or for a specific SDK add-on:

extensions.sdk.console.logLevel: this preference can be added to about:config to change the logging level of all installed SDK-based add-ons.

extensions.[extension-id].sdk.console.logLevel: this preference can be added to about:config to change the logging level of a specific add-on. This preference overrides the global preference.

The value for each preference is the desired logging level, given as a string. If neither preference is set, the logging level defaults to “error”.

Restoring the old behavior

If you want to restore the previous behavior in which console.log messages are visible in the error log, please do the following:

1. open about:config
2. right-click and select New -> String
3. for the preference name, enter ‘extensions.sdk.console.logLevel’
4. for the preference value, enter ‘all’
5. restart Firefox

Here is a screenshot of what the result should look like:

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.

• We are releasing SDK 1.14rc2 tomorrow, which will also likely be tagged tomorrow as the 1.14 release candidate. In addition to this we are coordinating with the Firefox team and release-drivers to ensure that the code in 1.14 is exactly the same as what we will release in Firefox 21. If you’re maintaining an SDK-based add-on, please help and test your code with ths new RC!
• Last week’s work week in Sunnyvale yielded all sorts of amazing work, look for a post over on hacks.mozilla.org tomorrow for the full details.
• Eddy blogged yesterday about his work on getting Firefox’s Browser Debugger working with SDK-based add-ons.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 509
• Bugs created last week: 37
• Bugs fixed last week: 12
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,646
• 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 2013-03-19 09:20:18 PDT

Meeting Brief

• PWPB support is complete, but 1.14 & Firefox 21 will ship with only partial support for Add-ons that opt in to work in Private Browsing mode.
• Cross-domain capabilities and Panel Positioning changes are close to landing, SDK 1.14 re-packs are on track, and we need to re-evaluate high-priority items as we move into Q2.
• SDK: 1.14 RC1 was released today – test! test!
• Roundtable: discussion on prioritizing deep integrators over work targeted at casual add-on developers.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-03-19#Minutes

• The entire developer tools team ( including the Jetpack team! ) will be meeting up in California next week to work together and hack on new ideas. As such, there will be no weekly meeting next week.
• Jetpack Bugmaster Wes Kocher released a module called ‘bmo.js’ that allows SDK developers simple access to the bugzilla api.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 481
• Bugs created last week: 29
• Bugs fixed last week: 20
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,576
• Open pull requests on Github: 35

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 2013-03-05 09:03:12 PST

Meeting Brief

• High Priority: PWPB has lots of pull requests in review, need to focus on Panel work. Need to hash out Panel Positioning design next week in person, Gabor hopes to land cross-domain content script capabilities in Firefox 22.
• SDK: tests getting flakier, help!
• Roundtable: GSOC ideas, bmo.js, windowless docshells, debugging support!

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-03-05#Minutes