Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/10/18

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 10 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 days.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

  • 132 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 73 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 95 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you want the review queues to shorten, you can help! If you’re an add-on developer, please consider joining our team. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 16 Compatibility

The Firefox 16 compatibility blog post is up.

The compatibility bump was run shortly before release, but an updated compatibility bump was sent today because one of the warnings needed to be updated. I incorrectly recommended to call init(null) for nsITransferable objects in 16 and above. However, the argument should be null only for some cases. You can find examples in this article.

Also, a regression was discovered in Firefox 16 that causes some add-ons to fail to load on some windows. Here’s the blog post that explains it. The bug wasn’t considered urgent enough to warrant a new Firefox 16 update, but it is already fixed in 17 and above.

Major change coming up in Firefox 17

The landing of bug 553102 made major change that can break compatibility for many add-ons. In a nutshell, if you set expando properties in JS objects in the content that point to chrome objects, you need to explicitly add the properties to the __exposedProps__ list of that object. A deprecation warning was added in Firefox 15. There’s more information here.

The compatibility post and bump should be coming in the following week or two.