With Jetpack, Mozilla stokes the customization fires

Firefox may never catch up to Chrome in the speed tests, but Mozilla has a huge lead when it comes to customization. The newly-announced Jetpack project might well ensure that they stay well ahead of the pack.

Jetpack aims to make browser addons easier to create by allowing developers to do so using only HTML, CSS, and Javascript (newer tags like <canvas> <audio> <video> are also supported, as is AJAX). And of course, Jetpack integrates well with Bespin (video clip after the break), which will make it easy for developers to create addons and roll out future updates.

You can see just how easy writing a Jetpack addon is in Mozilla's tutorial and by taking a quick look at the API reference.

If you add Jetpack to your Firefox install, don't expect perftection. It is, after all, only release 0.1.1. The two demos - GMail checker and UnAd - work just fine, but the position of their statusbar icons needs to be tweaked slightly.

The Firefox community loves their extensions, so making them easier to develop and accessible to a much larger group of developers is an excellent move by Mozilla. The simplicity Jetpack brings should allow for some exciting developments in a very short amount of time.