Mozilla Labs Takes Off with Jetpack

10. Jun, 2009 0 Comments

Mozilla Labs recently announced a call for participation in its latest project, Jetpack. Jetpack explores new ways to extend & personalize the Web.

Jetpack was received positively by the press, with many people noting that the already impressive size and dedication of the Mozilla add-ons community should help make the project a success. There seemed to be some initial confusion over the differences between Jetpack and Greasemonkey, but we continued to push the message that Jetpack was in part informed by the success of Greasemonkey, and that you’ll likely see support for Greasemonkey scripts to Jetpack to allow them work even better together.

The Register’s Cade Metz spoke with Aza Raskin about the goals of the project. He writes, “‘We want to enable more people to participate in the creation of browser functionality, following the Mozilla mission of making the browser yours, making the web yours,’ Mozilla’s head of user experience Aza Raskin told The Reg. ‘What if any eighth grader with a little skill could change the browser? What would that mean for the web?’”

CNet’s Josh Lowensohn notes some exciting benefits the release brings to users, “Besides no restarts and no breaking with updates, the most exciting aspect of Jetpack is how it can give users more control over what they see on a site, and how they can interact with its content. Like Ubiquity (another Mozilla Labs project), it also appears to be putting these add-ons right in the hands of users as soon as they visit a site with Jetpack controls, which means there’s less of a need to promote it in an add-ons directory to have users find it.”

US Coverage highlights:

PC Advisor, Lockergnome Blog, Trusted Reviews, Pocket-Lint, Internet News, Slashdot, TechSpot, InfoWorld, Ars Tehnica, CNet, PC World, eWeek, TechNewsWorld, ChannelWeb, InformationWeek, The Register, N4G, Vnunet.com