Become a Marketplace App Reviewer!

May 20 2013

This post originally appeared on the Apps blog, and we’re re-posting it for the AMO community in case anyone here is interested!

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A majority of add-ons on AMO are reviewed by volunteer contributors, and they are a big reason why addons.mozilla.org is a safe, thriving place for submitting and downloading add-ons. With the launch of Firefox Marketplace, contributors will again play an important role in helping to shape and nurture a new community.

App reviewers ensure apps submitted to the Firefox Marketplace adhere to security and privacy policies, and meet quality and user experience standards. In return, reviewers enjoy perks such as invitations to special Mozilla events around the world, fast-tracked reviews of their own apps, and cool gear from the incentives program.

You’ll have front-row seats to the apps arriving in the Marketplace, and as one of the first reviewers, you’ll have an opportunity to mentor new reviewers, and have a voice in how the community evolves.

Did we pique your interest? Learn more about the program here, or apply today!

Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/05/15

May 15 2013

by Jorge Villalobos

under compatibility, developers, documentation

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

The Review Queues

Most nominations for full review are taking less than 3 weeks to review.
Most updates are being reviewed within 1 week.
Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 1 week.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

88 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
59 updates in the queue awaiting review.
57 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 21 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 21 is up, and the the compatibility bump for AMO add-ons was run last week. Firefox 21 was released yesterday, so all compatibility updates should be uploaded to AMO as soon as possible, if they haven’t been already.

As usual we recommend using the Aurora and Beta branches to test your add-ons ahead of time.

ESR Compatibility

There are a couple of compatibility issues that are related to the ESR and other business deployments that are worth mentioning:

In Firefox 21, certain folders in the Firefox install directory where moved under browser/. You can read more about it on this bug. This affects installers that drop add-ons or other customizations in the install directory.
We’re planning on changing the version number scheme for ESR releases. The idea is that, if we have ESR 24, ESR version 24.1 would be the security upgrade that corresponds to Firefox 25. This way it is easier to associate an ESR version with its mainline equivalent in security patches. For add-ons, this means that maxVersions should always be in the form 24.*, rather than 24.0.*. This is especially important for add-ons with binary components, which don’t have default compatibility.

Jetpack Project: weekly update for May 14, 2013

May 14 2013

by Jeff Griffiths

under builder, developers, general, jetpack, mobile, releases, sdk

WE SHIPPED!!

Unless you’re hiding under a rock, you are probably aware that the Mozilla Project has released Firefox 21 today. Additionally, unless you’ve been completely ignoring my recent posts on this blog, you might also realize that Firefox 21 signals a new chapter in the life of the Jetpack project, as we ship the SDK’s module loader and APIs in Firefox 21.

To me this is a big deal, for add-on developers, for Firefox developers, for the entire project. I’d like to thank everyone involved for all the hard work, but in particular there are a few people who deserve special mention:

Atul Varma & Aza Raskin started Jetpack in 2009 in Mozilla Labs, then rebooted it in 2010, ushering in the modern era of content scripts, CommonJS modules the command-line cfx tool and Add-on Builder.
Dietrich Ayala, David Mason, Myk Melez & Brian Warner who guided the project through the ‘re-boot’ phase, always with an eye to landing Jetpack’s capabilities in Firefox and revolutionizing how Firefox features are made.
Dave Townsend, Irakli Gozalishvili and the rest of the current Jetpack team who have done a ton of work coordinating a series of important changes to make the SDK fit nicely into mozilla-central.
Various Mozilla Labs engineers including Shane Caraveo, Anant Narayanan, Andrew Sutherland & David Ascher who kicked the tires and built prototyped their own crazy ideas based on our shaky prototypes and beta releases.
Our fantastic contributors who keep showing up with great code for new features and bug fixes.

Now that we ship with Firefox I have decided to dial back the frequency of these posts to every 6 weeks on uplift and instead highlight for developers the new features and bug fixes that have landed in the recent Nightly cycle. As always if you have questions, feedback or want to get involved you can find us on the wiki, on the email list and of course in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

Quick Stats

Total open bugs: 505
Bugs created last week: 15
Bugs fixed last week: 13
Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,809
Open pull requests on Github: 54

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-05-14 10:39:08 PDT

Featured add-ons for May

May 1 2013

by Amy Tsay

under general

May is here, and it’s time for a new batch of featured add-ons! Featured add-ons are selected by a community board, which nominates and votes on great add-ons that appeal to a wide audience. We’re taking applications for the next board, so this is your chance to participate.

Anyone can nominate add-ons for the board’s consideration, so don’t be shy! Simply email amo-featured@mozilla.org with your suggestion (you’re welcome to submit your own for consideration).

Featured add-ons are promoted in rotation on the homepage of addons.mozilla.org, as well as in the monthly Firefox & You newsletter, our fan page, among other places.

Pick of the Month: New Tab Plus

New Tab Plus is an extended application of the Firefox browser that is based on HTML5. It offers features such as speed dial, cloud addition, and cloud backup to enhance the original New Tab function of Firefox.

This app is very useful and beautiful. I like the wallpaper so much.”

Get New Tab Plus »

Runners up:

TableTools2
Does everything for HTML tables: Copy, sort, search, filter, chart, statistics, rearrange, combine and compare. Get it now »

Tube Enhancer Plus
Tube Enhancer Plus improves not only YouTube, but also your browsing experience by letting you watch your favorite videos and playlists in the sidebar while surfing. Get it now »

Be on the next Featured Add-ons Board!

Apr 30 2013

by Amy Tsay

under developers, end users, general

It’s time to select a new community advisory board, whose members will choose the add-ons that are featured in the next six months. Featured add-ons gain lots of visibility and downloads, rewarding developers for their efforts, and assuring users they are vetted and useful.

Anyone from the add-ons community is welcome to apply: power users, theme designers, developers, and evangelists. Priority will be given to applicants who have not served on the board before, followed by those from previous boards, and finally from the outgoing board. This page provides more information about the duties of a board member.

To be considered, please email us at amo-featured@mozilla.org and tell us your name and how you’re involved with AMO, no later than May 9, 2013 23:59 PDT. The new board will be announced about a week after.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 21

Apr 26 2013

by Jorge Villalobos

under compatibility, developers, documentation

Firefox 21 will be released on May 14th. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 21 for Developers, so you should read that too.

General

Split platform and app resources up so that they can be loaded individually. Adapting Firefox for Metro has lead to some things moving around, including a number of popular JS modules.
- In Firefox 20 and below, resource:///modules/, resource://gre/modules/, and resource://app/modules/ point to the same location.
- In Firefox 21 and above, resource://gre/modules/ and resource://app/modules/ point to different places and have different sets of modules in them. resource:///modules/ points to resource://app/modules/. Most of what you want is in /gre/, though. The easiest way to test is to open Firefox 21 or later and try loading the URLs you use to import the modules. If they still work, you’re good.
Enable XBL Scopes. If you insert XBL bindings into content pages, calling functions to/from chrome can break under some circumstances and require additional code. You can read the details on the bug.
Remove ability to set higher JS versions via language attribute. This means you can no longer explicitly set the JS version using the language attribute, even in XUL documents.
Remove E4X from SpiderMonkey. E4X is no more.
Give the -moz-orient property an ‘auto’ value, and make it the default.
Change “-moz-user-select:none” to behave like “-moz-user-select:-moz-none”.
Make parseInt(“042″) === 42.

Places

Remove deprecated synchronous APIs from Places. Several synchronous functions have been removed. You can read the first comment in the bug for a list of the changes. This was also previously announced in the newsgroups.
Remove nsINavHistoryFullVisitResultNode. It’s worth noting this also removed two constants that some add-ons use: nsINavHistoryResultNode.RESULT_TYPE_FULL_VISIT and nsINavHistoryResultNode.RESULT_TYPE_DYNAMIC_CONTAINER.
Remove deprecated third argument from PlacesUIUtils.showBookmarkDialog.
Drop livemarks support from FUEL.
Remove onBeforeDeleteURI and onBeforeItemRemoved.
Avoid replacing nodes in Places query results and remove nodeReplaced views notification. Removes nsINavHistoryResultObserver.nodeReplaced.

XPCOM

nsIDownloadManagerUI uses obsolete download id. The optional download ID argument is now an nsIDownload object.
ContentChild’s nsIConsoleListener should have threadsafe addref/release methods. This change caused bug 852220. In a nutshell, you shouldn’t expect nsIConsoleListener objects to be notified immediately when a message is logged. Removing the listener can result in lost messages.
Remove expandEntityReferences from NodeIterator and TreeWalker.
Remove nsSelectionIterator. Removes nsISelectionPrivate.getEnumerator.

New!

Make language packs restartless by default. Yay!
Expose secure PRNG in the DOM. window.crypto.getRandomValues will now get you cryptographically random values.

Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 21, I’d like to know.

The automatic compatibility validation and upgrade for add-ons on AMO will happen very soon, so check your email if you have an add-on listed on AMO.

New sorting and viewing options for themes

Apr 25 2013

by Amy Tsay

under end users, themes

We’ve added some nifty sorting and viewing options for background themes! Due to performance concerns during the migration, we displayed only up to 60 themes on your profile page. Now, we’ve reduced the number to 20, and added a View All button.

When you click the View All button on an author’s profile page, you will see all the themes the author created, and also sort them by Up & Coming, Recently Added, Most Popular, and Top Rated. Previously, these sorting options were available only in category sections and not for specific authors.

Have fun, and enjoy!

Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/04/24

Apr 24 2013

by Jorge Villalobos

under compatibility, developers, documentation

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.