Categories: jetpack sdk

Announcing Add-on SDK 1.5!

The Jetpack team is pleased to announce the release of Add-on SDK version 1.5! This version of the SDK has two major new features as well as many smaller ones and some important bug fixes.

The two most important new features of this release are:

  • Mobile Support! – Developers can now start developing add-ons for the mobile version of Firefox. For the initial release of mobile compatibility we have the page-mod API working which will allow developers to create modifications to web content within their add-on. This is quite useful for creating mobile versions of website that do not have a good mobile support. This support for mobile Firefox is only for the new Native Android versions of Firefox (at time of this post, Aurora and Nightly). Primers on getting started developing add-ons for mobile Firefox can be found here and here.
  • Localization! – Localization has finally come to the Add-on SDK! For this initial version localizers can translate javascript-embedded strings with HTML string support coming in a future SDK release. An introduction on how to localize strings can be found in the documentation.

For more new features and known issues in Add-on SDK 1.5, please see the Release Notes!

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki

5 comments on “Announcing Add-on SDK 1.5!”

  1. Tim Babych wrote on

    Kudos on doing L10N right!

  2. Nils Maier wrote on

    Two other changes that add-on developers should also know about:
    – Memory leak fixes
    – Firefox 11 compatibility (repacking your add-ons with the SDK 1.5 is required)

    Please add important changes like these to your release announcements, as authors might not read the full release notes and then fail to see the need to upgrade.
    (We amo-editors still see a lot of 1.3 based submissions)

    1. Mingyi Liu wrote on

      I still have to use SDK1.0 to pack my Image2Icon addon because of a long-standing bug on simple content script use of canvas (introduced in 1.1 and on). I posted it on Google group and probably filed a bug report too, still no help in sight. And I faithfully tried 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4.2 on my addon. None worked. 1.0 is still the only one that works.

      I’m not hopeful 1.5 solves that, but for my other Jetpack addon Fastest Search, I’ll maybe use the localization in 1.5 once I have more time.

  3. John Nagle wrote on

    It doesn’t work.

    I repacked Ad Limiter with SDK 1.5, and opending the XPI file in Firefox produced the message “Ad Limiter cannot be installed because Firefox cannot modify the needed file”. The message does not not say what the “needed file” is.

    I repacked again with SDK 1.4.3, which worked previously, and it worked fine.

  4. Mingyi Liu wrote on

    The new localization is very nice, great job! But is Babelzilla supporting the new SDK localization yet? We’d need some instructions on how to utilize Babelzilla help getting our addons localized, as authors can’t do localizations in many languages themselves.