A common complaint from contributors when they first approach the Mozilla codebase is that it is very different from web development or other JS environments, and the large and complex set of APIs available have a steep learning curve. Recently the Jetpack team has been focusing its efforts on integrating the Add-on SDK APIs into Firefox. This has benefits for both Firefox and add-on developers:
- Add-on developers using the SDK will no longer need to re-pack their add-ons to benefit from bug fixes, as the SDK APIs will be included in Firefox builds.
- The Add-on SDK APIs will become available for all add-on developers, without the need to use the SDK's packaging infrastructure.
- New Firefox features can be implemented using de-facto standard CommonJS modules, allowing for modular, re-usable and easily testable code
- CommonJS module format enables use of many modules available in node's npm (Over 15300 packages have already being published on https://npmjs.org/)
Also learn about how some teams at Mozilla already use Jetpack APIs in Firefox core!
Speakers: Irakli Gozalshvili