Mozilla had to restart an effort to overhaul Firefox's extension technology, but the Jetpack reboot is steadily coming together.

Mozilla has released five beta versions of the Jetpack Software Developer Kit, a package that puts a friendly face on Firefox's inner workings so that extensions can do things such as open new tabs, add menu items, and modify Web pages. And the latest schedule was announced this week: its goal is to release Jetpack 1.0 by the end of 2010.

"We've been working on the SDK for almost a year now (and the Jetpack project as a whole for over a year), and we've done a bunch of great work that we should get into the hands of developers who could benefit from it," said Mozilla Jetpack team member Myk Melez in a mailing list message.

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