Project News Erik blogged about his excellent work on porting the SDK’s windows and tabs modules to Mobile Firefox! Not to be outdone, Will also blogged about our recently retro-fitted module lifecycle process and policies. Will has also just kicked off a lively thread over in the Jetpack Google Group about community-developed modules. If you’ve… Continue reading
Until now we’ve not had a very well-defined lifecycle for APIs in the Add-on SDK. We’ve said, broadly, that APIs in the addon-kit package are “supported”, meaning we won’t change them “unless absolutely necessary”, while APIs in the lower-level api-utils package are “not fully stabilized”, meaning that we expect to make incompatible changes to them.… Continue reading
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 2 weeks to review. Most updates are being reviewed within 10 days. Most preliminary reviews are… Continue reading
Project News You may have seen a post from Alex Keybl yesterday on changes to Firefox’s release schedule coming up at the end of the year: We’re going to extend the 11/19/2012 – 12/31/2012 cycle by a week, with a revised end of 1/6/2013. Given the timeline change, we’re targeting release of Firefox 18 for… Continue reading
We have made great strides in our efforts to automatically re-pack SDK add-ons to a recent version. As part of this effort I recently sent a few hundred emails ( with help from IT of course ) to add-on authors asking for help to test and update re-packed versions of their add-ons. If you ave… Continue reading
There is no doubt that modifying web content is one of the most popular features in the SDK. With this in mind, the SDK team is very excited about the upcoming 1.11 release. SDK Engineer Alexandre Poirot posted a nice overview of the key features we’ve been working on: page-mod API is the most commonly… Continue reading
It is common for software installers to include add-ons that are installed into Firefox and other browsers. Since software installers can often be confusing and most users click through them without reading, we introduced the opt-in install screen to make it clearer that an add-on was being installed into Firefox as part of the application… Continue reading
The Jetpack team is happy to announce the immediate availability of SDK 1.10. You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format. This latest release improves the SDK’s compatibility with Firefox Aurora and Nightly, fixes a ton of bugs, and also includes a few new bits you should check out: bug 764866:… Continue reading
The Mozilla EU community converged in Warsaw, Poland this year amidst a Lufthansa strike and rainy weather. Luck was on our side though, as we managed to dodge flight cancellations and make up lost time from missed flights. By Saturday morning, nearly everyone had made it and the sky cleared up. This was my first… Continue reading
Firefox 15 introduced a major improvement in memory usage, by disallowing add-ons to keep references to DOM objects after their parent document was destroyed. This eliminates the most common cause of memory leaks in add-ons, and should reduce memory consumption for many users. If you install an add-on that causes this kind of memory leak,… Continue reading
