Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/02/09

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 5 days to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 3 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 days.

These stats are taken from last week’s queue report:

  • 21 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 25 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 9 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our New Years Challenge has really paid off and add-ons are now reviewed almost immediately after they are submitted. Most add-ons waiting in the queue are waiting for actions from admin reviewers or their developers.

If you’re interested in joining the AMO Editors team and help us review add-ons, please visit our wiki page.

Test Your Add-ons for Memory Leaks!

The MemShrink team was assembled some time ago to work on reducing Firefox’s memory footprint. Many memory bugs have been filed and fixed for Firefox, but add-ons are also a significant factor in how much memory is being used.

There is an ongoing effort to track and stomp memory leaks in add-ons. Here’s where you can help, either by testing the add-ons you created, or testing the add-ons you use. Please read the article on Zombie Compartments, particularly the add-ons section. It should give you some pointers on how to find leaks and how to avoid them. The short version is don’t hold any references to DOM objects after the document is closed.

The AMO review team is already aware of this, and we have added memory leaks to our testing policies. Add-on versions that leaks may not get full review.

If you have any questions about this, post them in the comments.

Firefox 11

The Firefox 11 compatibility blog post is up now.

The compatibility bump will be run very soon, but it will be run differently than last time. Since Firefox 10 an above have add-on compatibility turned on by default, there’s no longer a need to do maxVersion bumping. So, we’re going to do run the usual compatibility checks, but only email developers if their add-ons don’t pass some of the checks. These add-ons that don’t will also be added to the compatibility override list so users know they are incompatible, provided that the compatibility bug really causes problems in the way the add-on works.

Firefox 12

Firefox 12 already hit the Aurora channel, so the compatibility updates should be coming soon.

2 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/02/09”

  1. John Kirk wrote on

    I hope I’m in the right blog for this question.

    I’m using windows 7 (non Mobile) PC. I often run into words I want to know the definition of. A number of Firefox add on are great for this problem IF I can highlight the word. PROBLEM is the words are sometimes imbedded in a hyperlink and I have trouble isolating just one word in the link. I know there are work arounds for this but:

    Does anyone know of a Firefox dictionary add on the will drill directly through the hyperlink and let me pick the word I want to look up using a maximum of two, preferably ONE click?

    Thanks in advance for your input.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      I think you’ll have a better chance of getting a response if you post your question in this forum.