Add-ons Blog

Jetpack Project: weekly update for February 19, 2013

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, developers, general, jetpack, sdk

Project News

Quick Stats

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 2013-02-19 09:32:31 PST

Meeting Brief

  • High Priority Items: loader & cfx items are done and landing soon, PWPB support coming in the next week or so, patches underway for x-domain content scripts, and Matteo is waiting for comments on the Panel Positioning proposal!
  • SDK: 1.14 is getting a version compatibility bump today with the release of FX 19.
  • Roundtable: need to land fix for bug 842486, some discussion of how to treat XUL content & and devtools-related content script questions.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-02-19#Minutes

Jetpack Project: weekly update for February 12, 2013

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under developers, jetpack, releases, sdk

Project News

Quick Stats

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 2013-02-12 09:06:45 PST

Meeting Brief

  • High Priority work: apis are landed, working on Py CFX & loader patches to support the new layout, patched and shipped a Memshrink bug and still slugging away at the rest of the list.
  • SDK: shipping 1.13.2 later today, as well as 1.14b2.
  • Roundtable: possible weirdness on tpbl due to the Fedora -> Ubuntu switch, looking into getting Fennec tests running as well as an alternative to unsafeWindow, and looking for creative ideas for GSOC projects.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-02-12#Minutes

Announcing Add-on SDK 1.13.2

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, developers, general, jetpack, releases, sdk

The Jetpack team would like to announce the immediate availability of SDK 1.13.2, which addresses several issues, including a P1 Memshrink bug:

  • Opening and closing browser windows seems to add FragmentOrElement objects to the CC graph when Addon SDK addons are installed which add an addonbar widget. (Bug 833783)
  • Context-menu reuses the same worker when a page navigates to a new location (Bug 839271)
  • Context-menu overflows depending on the total number of menu items regardless of whether they are hidden or not. (Bug 839318)
  • Context-menu overflow menu can become completely hidden. (Bug 839321)
  • Returning undefined from a context listener in a contentScript should hide the menu. (Bug 839814)
  • Context-menu doesn’t emit “click” event. (Bug 839872)

You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format. As well, Addon-SDK SDK 1.13.2 support will be added to the Add-on Builder and the AMO Validator in the next day or so.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 19

by Jorge Villalobos

7

under compatibility, developers, documentation

Firefox 19 will be released on February 19th. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 19 for Developers, so you should read that too.

General

Private Browsing

Private Browsing Mode is changing to support private and non-private windows opened at the same time. This means that many XPCOM interfaces and other functions are changing to support it. The changes are mostly new parameters that tell the function which context it is being called from, so that it can work accordingly.

There’s more information about the new private browsing in these docs: Supporting PBM, and Updating add-ons broken by PB changes.

XPCOM

New!

Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 19, 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 on AMO.

Help us select featured add-ons!

by Amy Tsay

5

under developers, end users

When add-ons are featured, they gain visibility and downloads; the developers are rewarded for their efforts, and users are assured the add-ons are vetted and useful. Starting this Spring, in addition to featuring extensions, we will also begin to feature complete themes! A fresh batch of complete themes will be chosen once a quarter, and featured extensions will continue to be chosen every month.

Here’s how you can be involved in deciding which add-ons are featured:

  1. Become a member of the featured add-ons board. The board is made up of add-on developers and fans, and is responsible for nominating and selecting featured add-ons. Each term lasts for six months, and a call for applications for the next board will go out in May.
  2. Send an email to amo-featured@mozilla.org with your suggestion, and it will be added to the board’s consideration list.

Downloads of our picks-of-the-month consistently double during the month they are featured, so your votes really make a difference!

The Add-on SDK: coming soon to Firefox 21

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, developers, jetpack, releases, sdk

I thought I’d shamelessly quote and link to an exciting post by Dave Townsend ( aka Mossop ) who is the engineering manager for the Jetpack team:

We’re now a big step closer to shipping the SDK APIs with Firefox and other apps, we’ve uplifted the SDK code from our git repository to mozilla-inbound and assuming it sticks we will be on the trains for releasing. We’ll be doing weekly uplifts to keep the code in mozilla-central current.

The Add-on SDK is now in Firefox! ( oxymoronical.com )

So what did we actually do? Well, over the last few months we have made a few changes to the SDK to make it fit better into Mozilla’s mercurial repository, to run tests the way our IT and QA teams expect, and to ensure that the SDK’s apis can be used in any add-on code. We’ve been doing a lot of this integration work on the ‘larch’ branch, and today Dave merged from larch to mozilla-inbound. If all goes well in a little under 3 weeks this code will get uplifted to the Aurora channel, and 3 weeks after that the same code-base will get released as Add-on SDK 1.14, the last release of the SDK that will include the APIs.

I will post a more detailed plan of what the process will be as we transition to shipping the APIs in Firefox and decouple our docs and tool releases from the train model. In the meantime, I’d like to thank the entire community who have contributed to Jetpack over the years for their support, bugs, patience and code.

Cheers!

Announcing Add-on SDK 1.13.1

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, developers, jetpack, releases, sdk

The Jetpack team would like to announce the immediate availability of SDK 1.13.1, which addresses several issues:

  • Reverted context menu items in sub-menus to display by default as they did in 1.12 ( bug 836318 )
  • Fixed an issue where certain combinations of add-ons could result in an extra separator in the context menu ( bug 832401 )
  • Fixed a logged error from the selection module ( bug 834754 )
  • Fixed the simple-storage and other modules when run against Firefox 21 ( bug 836061 )

I would like to personally thank Izydor for reporting bug 836318 to the mailing list yesterday – we really appreciate user feedback.

You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format. Addon-SDK SDK 1.13.1 is also now live on Add-on Builder, and the AMO validator should support this new version later this afternoon.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

Per-Window Private Browsing and the SDK

by Jeff Griffiths

under compatibility, developers, general, jetpack, sdk

Erik Vold has been working hard to implement support for Per-Window Private Browsing in the SDK, and he posted a summary of the work and how it will impact add-on authors yesterday:

To put the change simply, before with global private browsing a add-on developer need only know if the mode was active or not and when that state changed, now with per-window private browsing none of that information is available because it no longer exists.

With per-window private browsing a add-on developer will need to know if the information they are handling came from a private-browsing window and either ignore it, handle it sensitively, and possibly do some extra cleanup work for the sensitive data when the associated window is closed, or when the last private browsing window is closed. The best approach to take depends on the use case.

If you are maintaining an SDK-based add-on, here is our best advice in order to ensure that your add-on keeps working as expected over the next couple of Firefox versions:

  1. Re-pack your existing add-on to SDK 1.13, released yesterday and re-submit it to AMO. This will immunize you from an upcoming change in Firefox 21 that will remove the oldd Global Private browsing service completely. Unless you take this initial step, users will not be able to use your add-on with Firefox 21.
  2. Once SDK 1.14 is released on March 12th, re-pack your add-on again to SDK 1.14. This will allow you to specify whether your add-on will be active in Private Browsing windows, and the default will be ‘inactive’.

The SDK team will be working with AMO to mitigate the impact of these changes in a number of ways:

  • We will be reaching out to the community via posts like this and encouraging people to re-pack their add-ons.
  • We will continue to identify add-ons on AMO that use very old and/or dangerous add-ons and marking them incompatible with newer versions of Firefox.
  • We will be re-visiting our re-packing scripts that can potentially re-pack large numbers of simple add-ons. I’ll report back in a few weeks with the specifics of this work.

Comments are disabled for this post – I’ve posted a thread to the Jetpack Google group – if you have concerns or comments regarding these changes I encourage you to post there:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla-labs-jetpack/5aJhHXzodpM/6B_9kU2UAG4J

Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/01/30

by Jorge Villalobos

6

under compatibility, developers, documentation, themes

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.

In case you missed it, give 2012 in Add-on Reviews a look. It’s a good overview of what the review team did last year and how it compares to previous years.

The Review Queues

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 3 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:

  • 95 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 103 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 101 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 18 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 18 is available here. The compatibility bump was run shortly before release.

The Firefox 19 blog post and bump should come soon.

Merging Themes

We finally merged Background Themes (previously known as Personas) and Complete Themes (previously known as Themes) into a single themes category on AMO. However, we made some mistakes with the initial design that made Complete Themes less visible than we intended to, which are being worked on right now. We hope to have a more balanced Themes section in the coming weeks.

Jetpack Project: weekly update for January 29, 2013

by Jeff Griffiths

1

under developers, general, jetpack, releases, sdk

Project News

Quick Stats

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 2013-01-29 09:48:05 PST

Meeting Brief

  • High Priority items: making good progress on most issues, need to re-visit the priority of ‘Cfx.js in add-on builder’.
  • SDK: coordinating last items on the 1.13 release checklist today, need to re-visit re-packing.
  • Roundtable: confusion on a missing change, last call for items in the release notes.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2013-01-29#Minutes