Jetpacks for every internet citizen

Finally! We’re getting our jetpacks for the 21st century like we deserve.

https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/05/introducing-jetpack-call-for-participation/

There’s a short explanation of what it is and a demonstration video.

This seems a lot like Greasemonkey, but with several interesting integration points, with embedded jQuery and a cross-domain XMLHttpRequest object by default and tighter integration with the browser user interface.

Will this outgrow the popularity and usefulness of Greasemonkey, Chromemetal, Opera userscripts etc. that is hard to predict. And how easily is a Jetpack script ported to other browsers? At least the Greasemonkey add-on has been quite stale lately with not much visible progress and has caused at least one eager developer to create a fork of Greasemonkey, namely Webmonkey. Which solution will be the most advanced and useful one in the end, Webmonkey or Jetpack, its hard to predict.

I hope that competition will bring good features to all of our browsers, but  in this case having more than one platform for distributing scripts seems a bit confusing.

Since it’s very alpha right now, I don’t except any normal user to actually install it yet. Also there are probably lots of bugs, memory leaks, security holes and other kinds of problems in the early stages, so I would recommend anyone who prefers to feel safe not to install it just yet, before the add-on becomes mature.

Certainly an interesting add-on product worth keeping your eyes peeled for.