Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2010/08/31

Summary

• These bi-weekly posts explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers. There’s a lengthy overview of the Add-on Review Process posted in this blog that should be read as a general guide about the review process.
• Most nominations are being reviewed within 1 week.
• Almost every update is being reviewed within 5 days.

The Review Queues

• The stats are taken from the latest queue report from last Friday.
• 54 new nominations that week. 75 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 60 updates that week. 55 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 864 reviews performed by AMO Editors this month. There were 18 editors performing reviews last week.

See the Add-on Review Process and You for information on how to check your  add-on status.

Firefox 4 Compatibility

Firefox 4 is coming later this year, and beta 3 is currently available for download. This will likely be the most difficult upgrade path for add-on developers in the history of Firefox, so everybody should keep an eye on beta updates and all the documentation that will be published around them. At the moment these are the most useful documentation resources:

• Firefox 4 for developers at MDC.
• Firefox 4 Compatibility blog post (New, beta 4 edition!).
• Firefox 4 Compatibility discussion in the Add-ons Forum. This is the best place to post any feedback, bugs or insight surrounding Firefox 4 and add-on development.

I’ll do my best to keep everybody up to date with breaking changes in Firefox 4, and I will post a new compat update when we’re closer to RC1. In the interim I’ll use these reports to post all the new (sometimes unconfirmed) feedback I’ve received, with as much information I have at hand. Here are the notes I have so far:

• Toolbar customization. There’s a bug in toolbar customization that can revert changes performed by users. Note that the bug can be triggered by add-ons that access certain browser features before the onload event is fired. If this is the case for your add-on, please read the comments on the linked bug carefully.
• From Mook: How do I override a contract ID dynamically, and forwarding things to the old implementation (essentially wrapping it) so only behaviour I specifically care about get modified? Is this something that the new XPCOM registration method won’t support?
• From Christopher Finke: app tabs can be toggled using gBrowser.pinTab(tab);
• From Raphael: the content context menu is broken.

Notes for Developers

• How to Improve Extension Startup Performance. All extension developers should read this blog post. It explains how extensions can have a significant impact in startup performance and, some very simple steps you can follow to minimize this impact. There’s also a link to some tools that can be used to easily measure startup.
• New Proposal for Review Process and Delightful Add-ons. This is a new and different approach to resolve the issue of add-on safety in the sandbox and code reviews. All add-on developers should read this and give feedback. It’s been a long process to try to find the right balance of the many elements involved, and we think this is it.
• The AMO Editor Guide. This new page in the wiki is a comprehensive guide to the work performed by AMO Editors. It will serve as an introductory guide for new editors, and is a step forward in being as transparent as possible with our review process.
• Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla