As far as add-ons, "the amazing thing there is we have no idea what people are going to come up with," Raskin said in an interview. Mozilla has seen extensions such as Cooliris, which provides 3D viewing, and AdBlock Plus, for turning off Web ads, Raskin said.

"The question we asked ourselves is what [would happen] if any eighth-grader that can write a Web page [could] fundamentally enhance the functionality of the browser," said Raskin.

The current 0.1 release of JetPack serves as a prototype and features an API, jQuery support, and an IDE via the Bespin cloud-based code editor. The initial API release does not include a fully formed security model.

A 1.0 version with a stable API is anticipated in a few months. Mozilla is looking for participation in the project via this

Although initially built to work with Firefox, developers could extend it to work with other browsers as well.