This post originally appeared on the Apps blog, and we’re re-posting it for the AMO community in case anyone here is interested!

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A majority of add-ons on AMO are reviewed by volunteer contributors, and they are a big reason why addons.mozilla.org is a safe, thriving place for submitting and downloading add-ons. With the launch of Firefox Marketplace, contributors will again play an important role in helping to shape and nurture a new community.

App reviewers ensure apps submitted to the Firefox Marketplace adhere to security and privacy policies, and meet quality and user experience standards. In return, reviewers enjoy perks such as invitations to special Mozilla events around the world, fast-tracked reviews of their own apps, and cool gear from the incentives program.

You’ll have front-row seats to the apps arriving in the Marketplace, and as one of the first reviewers, you’ll have an opportunity to mentor new reviewers, and have a voice in how the community evolves.

Did we pique your interest? Learn more about the program here, or apply today!

The Review Queues

• Most nominations for full review are taking less than 3 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 1 week.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 1 week.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 88 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 59 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 57 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 21 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 21 is up, and the the compatibility bump for AMO add-ons was run last week. Firefox 21 was released yesterday, so all compatibility updates should be uploaded to AMO as soon as possible, if they haven’t been already.

As usual we recommend using the Aurora and Beta branches to test your add-ons ahead of time.

ESR Compatibility

There are a couple of compatibility issues that are related to the ESR and other business deployments that are worth mentioning:

• In Firefox 21, certain folders in the Firefox install directory where moved under browser/. You can read more about it on this bug. This affects installers that drop add-ons or other customizations in the install directory.
• We’re planning on changing the version number scheme for ESR releases. The idea is that, if we have ESR 24, ESR version 24.1 would be the security upgrade that corresponds to Firefox 25. This way it is easier to associate an ESR version with its mainline equivalent in security patches. For add-ons, this means that maxVersions should always be in the form 24.*, rather than 24.0.*. This is especially important for add-ons with binary components, which don’t have default compatibility.

Unless you’re hiding under a rock, you are probably aware that the Mozilla Project has released Firefox 21 today. Additionally, unless you’ve been completely ignoring my recent posts on this blog, you might also realize that Firefox 21 signals a new chapter in the life of the Jetpack project, as we ship the SDK’s module loader and APIs in Firefox 21.

To me this is a big deal, for add-on developers, for Firefox developers, for the entire project. I’d like to thank everyone involved for all the hard work, but in particular there are a few people who deserve special mention:

• Atul Varma & Aza Raskin started Jetpack in 2009 in Mozilla Labs, then rebooted it in 2010, ushering in the modern era of content scripts, CommonJS modules the command-line cfx tool and Add-on Builder.
• Dietrich Ayala, David Mason, Myk Melez & Brian Warner who guided the project through the ‘re-boot’ phase, always with an eye to landing Jetpack’s capabilities in Firefox and revolutionizing how Firefox features are made.
• Dave Townsend, Irakli Gozalishvili and the rest of the current Jetpack team who have done a ton of work coordinating a series of important changes to make the SDK fit nicely into mozilla-central.
• Various Mozilla Labs engineers including Shane Caraveo, Anant Narayanan, Andrew Sutherland & David Ascher who kicked the tires and built prototyped their own crazy ideas based on our shaky prototypes and beta releases.
• Our fantastic contributors who keep showing up with great code for new features and bug fixes.

Now that we ship with Firefox I have decided to dial back the frequency of these posts to every 6 weeks on uplift and instead highlight for developers the new features and bug fixes that have landed in the recent Nightly cycle. As always if you have questions, feedback or want to get involved you can find us on the wiki, on the email list and of course in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 505
• Bugs created last week: 15
• Bugs fixed last week: 13
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,809
• Open pull requests on Github: 54

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-05-14 10:39:08 PDT

Anyone can nominate add-ons for the board’s consideration, so don’t be shy! Simply email amo-featured@mozilla.org with your suggestion (you’re welcome to submit your own for consideration).

Featured add-ons are promoted in rotation on the homepage of addons.mozilla.org, as well as in the monthly Firefox & You newsletter, our fan page, among other places.

Pick of the Month: New Tab Plus

New Tab Plus is an extended application of the Firefox browser that is based on HTML5. It offers features such as speed dial, cloud addition, and cloud backup to enhance the original New Tab function of Firefox.

This app is very useful and beautiful. I like the wallpaper so much.”

Get New Tab Plus »

Runners up:

TableTools2
Does everything for HTML tables: Copy, sort, search, filter, chart, statistics, rearrange, combine and compare. Get it now »

Tube Enhancer Plus
Tube Enhancer Plus improves not only YouTube, but also your browsing experience by letting you watch your favorite videos and playlists in the sidebar while surfing. Get it now »

Anyone from the add-ons community is welcome to apply: power users, theme designers, developers, and evangelists. Priority will be given to applicants who have not served on the board before, followed by those from previous boards, and finally from the outgoing board. This page provides more information about the duties of a board member.

To be considered, please email us at amo-featured@mozilla.org and tell us your name and how you’re involved with AMO, no later than May 9, 2013 23:59 PDT. The new board will be announced about a week after.

We look forward to hearing from you!

General

• Split platform and app resources up so that they can be loaded individually. Adapting Firefox for Metro has lead to some things moving around, including a number of popular JS modules.
  • In Firefox 20 and below, resource:///modules/, resource://gre/modules/, and resource://app/modules/ point to the same location.
  • In Firefox 21 and above, resource://gre/modules/ and resource://app/modules/ point to different places and have different sets of modules in them. resource:///modules/ points to resource://app/modules/. Most of what you want is in /gre/, though. The easiest way to test is to open Firefox 21 or later and try loading the URLs you use to import the modules. If they still work, you’re good.
• Enable XBL Scopes. If you insert XBL bindings into content pages, calling functions to/from chrome can break under some circumstances and require additional code. You can read the details on the bug.
• Remove ability to set higher JS versions via language attribute. This means you can no longer explicitly set the JS version using the language attribute, even in XUL documents.
• Remove E4X from SpiderMonkey. E4X is no more.
• Give the -moz-orient property an ‘auto’ value, and make it the default.
• Change “-moz-user-select:none” to behave like “-moz-user-select:-moz-none”.
• Make parseInt(“042″) === 42.

Places

• Remove deprecated synchronous APIs from Places. Several synchronous functions have been removed. You can read the first comment in the bug for a list of the changes. This was also previously announced in the newsgroups.
• Remove nsINavHistoryFullVisitResultNode. It’s worth noting this also removed two constants that some add-ons use: nsINavHistoryResultNode.RESULT_TYPE_FULL_VISIT and nsINavHistoryResultNode.RESULT_TYPE_DYNAMIC_CONTAINER.
• Remove deprecated third argument from PlacesUIUtils.showBookmarkDialog.
• Drop livemarks support from FUEL.
• Remove onBeforeDeleteURI and onBeforeItemRemoved.
• Avoid replacing nodes in Places query results and remove nodeReplaced views notification. Removes nsINavHistoryResultObserver.nodeReplaced.

XPCOM

• nsIDownloadManagerUI uses obsolete download id. The optional download ID argument is now an nsIDownload object.
• ContentChild’s nsIConsoleListener should have threadsafe addref/release methods. This change caused bug 852220. In a nutshell, you shouldn’t expect nsIConsoleListener objects to be notified immediately when a message is logged. Removing the listener can result in lost messages.
• Remove expandEntityReferences from NodeIterator and TreeWalker.
• Remove nsSelectionIterator. Removes nsISelectionPrivate.getEnumerator.

New!

• Make language packs restartless by default. Yay!
• Expose secure PRNG in the DOM. window.crypto.getRandomValues will now get you cryptographically random values.

Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 21, I’d like to know.

The automatic compatibility validation and upgrade for add-ons on AMO will happen very soon, so check your email if you have an add-on listed on AMO.

When you click the View All button on an author’s profile page, you will see all the themes the author created, and also sort them by Up & Coming, Recently Added, Most Popular, and Top Rated. Previously, these sorting options were available only in category sections and not for specific authors.

Have fun, and enjoy!

The Review Queues

• Most nominations for full review are taking less than 4 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 98 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 117 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 105 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our new reviewer incentives program has become a great motivator for our review team. If you’re an add-on developer, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 20 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 20 was already posted, and the the compatibility bump for AMO add-ons was run. Keep in mind that major changes happened for Private Browsing Mode and the Download UI in this release.

Firefox 21 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 21 should come out later this week, and we expect the compatibility bump to happen next week or the week after that.

This week I’d like to tease some of the new stuff we’re working on. We’re excited to be implementing some new APIs that allow developers to add buttons and other common UI elements to the Firefox navigation bar. Based on Matteo’s JEP, here is an example of how this would work:

const { Button } = require("sdk/button");
 
// Minimal "action" button, default icon, 16x16
let actionButton = Button({
    id: "my-button",
    label: "My Button"
});
 
actionButton.on("click", function() {
    // do something when the button is clicked
});

This work is linked to a huge effort on the part of the Firefox team to deliver a refresh of Firefox’s look and feel called ‘Australis’ in Firefox 24.

Next up, we’re also excited to bring more of the web into add-on development. Irakli and Eddy have been working on a simple way to import DOM apis and use them in your add-on. Here’s a small example to illustrate how we expect this to work:

let { window } = require("sdk/addon/window");
let exampleSocket = new window.WebSocket(
    "ws://www.example.com/socketserver", 
    ["protocolOne", "protocolTwo"]
);

If you have any feedback on this or other upcoming work, we’d love to hear from you, either in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org or via the Jetpack mailing list.

Quick Stats

• Total open bugs: 521
• Bugs created last week: 25
• Bugs fixed last week: 11
• Total SDK-based Add-ons on AMO: 1,751
• Open pull requests on Github: 53

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2013-04-23 08:42:09 PDT

Meeting Brief

• High Priority work: Last private browsing changes need to be uplifted, cross-domain content script support is landed on the platform but needs an owner for the JS side.
• Roundtable: we’ll start flagging good first bugs in triage, dcamp had some questions about loader internals.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-04-23#Minutes

If you had a getpersonas account only, or had both getpersonas and AMO accounts and made sure your email addresses matched prior to the migration, you should be able to log in using the same credentials.

On your profile page, you will see any themes you designed previously under “Themes I’ve Created”. On the detail page of a theme you created, you will see an Edit button that will take you to a page with your editing options. You can also go to the Manage My Add-ons page to see a list of themes (and add-ons) you’ve created, along with helpful links to manage them.

To see your Favorites collection, click on My Favorites from the menu at the top.

If you are using the Personas Plus add-on, we’ve updated it to work with AMO; however, due to resource constraints we kept only the most popular features (e.g. local themes and rotating themes), and dropped some of the browsing features. If you are using Personas Rotator, please note that it will not work until the developer has updated it for AMO.

If you’re new to themes and would like to try your hand at creating some, take a look at the tutorial!

Have fun!