

Announcing Jetpack 0.7 - edw519
http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2009/12/23/announcing-jetpack-0-7/

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Kilimanjaro
My view:

\- Chrome extensions are beating jetpacks by a long shot.

\- There should be a unified/standard way to build extensions for browsers
based on javascript.

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euroclydon
Does this give Firefox a little breathing room from the coming Chrome
onslaught? I've heard developing AddOns for Firefox is a real pain and that
AddOns for Chrome are easy in comparison. That, plus Chrome's speed is
supposed to really start eating into Firefox's user share.

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mmastrac
Yeah on all counts IMHO. I'm currently developing both firefox and chrome
extensions and there is an order of magnitude difference in effort and
technical complexity between them.

Jetpack is a great start for extension developers and it gives the FF team the
ability to implement multiprocess browsing without breaking extensions left
and right. As it stands now, FF is basically one big single threaded JS
process (with other non scripting stuff delegated to other threads as
possible). Small caveat: I am reasonably sure I understand how it works under
the hood having worked so closely to it while writing extensions but I may
have details wrong.

I'm a Chrome fan and full time user, but I think Firefox will reign king over
the modern browsers for a while. They need to break the single threaded JS
loop, finish up the out of process plugin work and continue work on reducing
the overall memory footprint of long-running Firefox sessions from buggy
extensions and the complexity of working with long lived , fragmented heaps.
Jetpack itself will help contribute to some of this.

Firefox is still architected in places for machines of Y2K while Chrome had
the advantage of assuming modern machines.

I wouldn't count the Firefox team out at any rate. They make a lot of progress
on platform and footprint every release.

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euroclydon
Are you saying that most of the Firefox codebase (with the exception of the JS
engine) is written in JS? The DOM parsing?

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mmastrac
Most of the core infrastructure (DOM, layout, etc) is C++. The UI is XUL (XML
layout language) with much of the supporting UI logic written in JS.

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AndrewDucker
I do like the idea of Jetpack - but I don't see it really taking off until
it's built in, which it hopefully will be, once it's mature.

