Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/03/22

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 10 days to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 7 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 5 days.

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

  • 70 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 56 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 46 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

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.

Firefox 11 Compatibility

The Firefox 11 compatibility blog post has been up for a while. The automatic compatibility bump was done last week.

Firefox 12 Compatibility

The Firefox 12 compatibility blog post is finally up. It also includes some major changes coming in Firefox 13, so make sure to give it a read. The Firefox 12 compatibility bump should happen within the next couple of weeks.

6 responses

  1. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    “we have added memory leaks to our testing policies”

    Is that automated? And will it become available perhaps through the Validate Add-on page/feature?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      No, it’s manual testing. The Zombie Compartments page explains how to perform these tests.

  2. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    Thanks. Makes me respect AMO editor’s work even more.

  3. mirthawatt wrote on :

    This is my first time on your blog. Your blog looks that it is a weekly one. I was researching info on debugging. And found that on March 12, 2012 A new JavaScript debugger update was released. It has the ability to pause and play JavaScript code execution, and watch variables. Do you see this update as incredibly beneficial?

  4. Paul Clare wrote on :

    I am an 80 year old withbasic internet skills. Do I need to update my #11 to # 13 ? Thank You.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      You don’t need to update. Version #12 will be released in a couple of weeks and version #13 will follow 6 weeks later. 12 and 13 are test versions at the moment, so it’s best that you stay with 11.