Some of you might remember reading my blog post on my experience about porting the Bugzilla Tweaks jetpack to the Jetpack SDK.  I talked about almost everything in that post except where you can find the actual extension!  That was intentional, because there were quite a few bugs in the early versions, and I didn't want to release something which is basically broken.  But those issues have been mostly solved now, and I'm releasing the jetpack as a Firefox extension.

One of the things that we at Mozilla would like to do better at is the amount of time it takes between when you launch Firefox, and when it starts up and is usable.  We've been tackling this problem for quite a while, and have already made tremendous improvements.  But we think we can still do better.

I just landed a set of patches on mozilla-central which makes the initialization of the editor for text fields (input type="text" and input type="password" in HTML terms) lazy.  What we used to do was to initialize the editor component for text fields as soon as we created frames for those elements.  This was not ideal, because users don't usually use all of those fields on web pages (think about the "search" text fields you see on every website nowadays, for example.)  It also made Gecko significantly slow for pages which included a lot of those elements.

If you use Firefox nightly builds, and you had the Jetpack Prototype installed, you might have noticed that about two weeks ago, your jetpacks had started to get disabled a short while after you had opened your browser.  This issue was really frustrating, since some of us run jetpacks which are very important in our daily work.

The ability of editing HTML content on the web is nothing new, we've all used it to write emails in Web-based email clients, post content on our blogs, adding content to web sites, etc.  Web sites usually do this using the execCommand API, with either iframes put into designMode, or contentEditable elements, and occasionally utilize things such as the DOM Range API and -->