Mozilla and Jar
July 14th, 2004
There was some chatter at work about why Mozilla extensions use the Java
Archive (jar) format for storing their internals (instead of
something like good old zip). The answer: jar adds metadata
to zipfiles, so digital signatures can be attached to the jar payload.
The contents don’t have anything to do with Java specifically, but
better that they use an existing tool that solves the problem then come
up with some other incompatible format. Reduce, reuse, refactor!
More info at mozilla.org: Signed
Scripts.