Jetpack Addons for Firefox !

Since the Jetpack Prototype for FireFox has been deactivated and the jetpackgallery taken offline (permanent redirect), the auto-update broke the scripts I still used. 2 scripts were heavily used by me and I already missed them.

I did a lil’ bit of coding for Jetpack Prototype, and always wanted to with the new Jetpack SDK, which is not that polished, as a dev environment, yet, so the initial start-overcoming was not marginal (in a psychological way).

Today though, I did code. And it was rather easy and simple.

The Jetpack SDK works flawlessly on my Linux system. It’s a matter of some simple commands to compile the addon and run it in a test-instance/-profile of FireFox.

The Jetpack libs themselves still lack quite a lot, but if you’re diving more into it you can also check the Addon Builder; there’s some libs hosted there as well.

So, back to my scripts / addons:

The ones I missed were CSS-Refresh and Context-Menu-Translation.

So I did them.

CSS-Refresh works perfectly.

As useful as ever.

(Yes I noticed there was already one addon and one Jetpack addon in the Mozilla Addon website. Was a good thing to start with though.)

I did not manage to implement my GTranslate like the prototype-script worked, as there’s no selection-functionality in the core-libs yet. But it works with Blocks; so instead of the selected text, a whole paragraph will be translated. For links and the likes it’s not a problem anyway.

What I did improve is that one now switches to a target language. With the prototype script one had to search for (in a long list) and click the target language for each translation. Now you change modes and use an easy to find menu item to translate.

I noticed though that one Jetpack Addon can not add more than one context-menu root item. Well, no problem. Maybe it’s better this way, as a sub-menu, anyway. But I was surprised when I first tried it with 2 root elements…

I also did a third one, using a widget: Number Of Open Tabs This is a rather useless and stupid addon; also because tabs.tabs was not set, but should have according to docs, and the widget doesn’t seem to refresh and doesn’t seem to be refreshable. So I’m remove-adding it. 🙂

But it works and is good enough for a tech-demo and source-try.

What I’m also missing is the settings. I was surprised to also not find them on the (kinda-)Roadmap. Being able to configure Addons is pretty important.

So, I’ll probably add the 2 better addons to the addon website tomorrow.

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If you’re new to JetPack:

Jetpacks are lighter addons one can install and load without having to restart the browser. Also, they’re written in web-technology, mainly JavaScript.

They also have some other advantages, like re-usability. For more info see the Jetpack website, and maybe watch one of their presentations.

What I especially like about this, as a plus, is that the jetpacks work like normal addons right now, in FF 3.6. With Firefox 4 they will be real Jetpacks, installing without restart etc. Like we were able to experience with the Jetpack Prototype Addon.