We’ve identified an issue in which some users may have one or more of their add-ons hidden after upgrading to the latest Firefox version, affecting both desktop and mobile. These add-ons and their data are still intact and haven’t actually been removed. We paused new updates to Firefox to minimize the potential impact on users and will soon release an update to fix this issue and ensure all your add-ons are visible and usable. In the meantime, if you notice an add-on missing entirely from the Add-ons Manager, you can use a simple workaround to recover them.

We are working hard to resolve this issue. We know how important add-ons are to you and apologize for the inconvenience.

Justin Scott, on behalf of the Firefox Add-ons team

We are doing pretty well on the compatibility front, but there are still many add-ons that are incompatible with 7, some of them very popular. If any of your add-ons are among this group, I encourage you to read the compatibility documentation available and update your add-on as soon as possible.

Rapid Releases – Get on the Train!

I know many of you are feeling the pain of the rapid release cycle. This is why we introduced the automatic compatibility bumps, that are being run roughly a week after a new version is released. However, one thing that you may not know is that the compatibility bumps are run to keep add-ons up to date with the Aurora channel.

So, if you want your add-on to be automatically upgraded when possible, you need to submit a version compatible with the Firefox 8 builds (or test and upgrade your current version on AMO) as soon as possible. A new version doesn’t need to be approved by the editor team in order to qualify for these automatic checks. It just needs to be on the site. We will run the Firefox 9 compatibility tests in a couple of weeks, and then you’ll be emailed with information about whether your add-on passed them or not. If it passes, you won’t have anything more to do for another 6 weeks. Ideally, this should happen for most add-ons and most releases, which hasn’t been far from the truth so far.

For those of you who like waiting until the final version is available in order to test and upgrade their add-ons (which we don’t recommend), you can treat the current Firefox 7 beta 6 as the final build. Unless something urgent comes up, that is Firefox 7.

Happy coding!

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 4 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 64 new nominations that week. 238 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 228 new updates that week. 279 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 89 new preliminary review submissions that week. 226 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 5 and 6

If you still haven’t updated your add-on, here’s an overview of the breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If you’re a theme developer, also check out this post.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post. The compatibility bump for Firefox 7 was run already, so if your add-on is not compatible yet, we recommend you test and see if any changes are required.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here. We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 8 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. Firefox 9 is coming to Aurora in a couple of weeks, so you should look into this soon.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 3 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 1 week.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 93 new nominations that week. 195 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 202 new updates that week. 218 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 122 new preliminary review submissions that week. 185 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.
• 969 reviews performed by editors in the month of August so far.

Firefox 5 and 6

If you still haven’t updated your add-on, here’s an overview of the breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If you’re a theme developer, also check out this post.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post. The compatibility bump for Firefox 7 was run already, so if your add-on is not compatible yet, we recommend you test and see if any changes are required.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post will be published later this week, and the bump will run next week or the one after.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.

Summary

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Nominations are currently taking about 3 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
• We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team and helped us cut down review times drastically. Just look at earlier reports for comparison. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

• These stats are taken from the last queue report.
• 85 new nominations that week. 255 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 132 new updates that week. 132 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 126 new preliminary review submissions that week. 135 in the queue awaiting review.
• 1834 reviews performed in the month of July (updated).

Compatibility

The release schedule is available here. The next push is currently scheduled for August 16th. This will be the release date for Firefox 6, the push of Firefox 7 to the beta channel, and the push of Firefox 8 to the Aurora channel.

The AMO compatibility push for Firefox 7 was run less than a week ago. A last minute change (to revert the JSON interface changes) and some bugs on our tools delayed the push significantly. We hope to run the Firefox 8 compatibility push shortly after the Aurora push, in a couple of weeks.

On this front, you should also look into this proposal by Justin Scott, to make add-ons compatible by default after Firefox updates. It’s based on the idea that most add-ons won’t require any code changes to work satisfactorily in new versions of Firefox, specially considering the small changes between releases. Please add your questions, show your support, etc. in the linked discussion.

Firefox 5 and 6

I posted a thorough look at breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If there’s anything missing there, please let us know.

Firefox 7 and 8

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 7 was published some time. It mentions a couple of possible changes in Firefox 8, one of which might be reverted as well (the nsIDOMWindowInternal removal). The detailed compatibility post for Firefox 8 will be published close to its push to Aurora.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.

Our analysis of the bug fixes for Firefox 7 has produced the following list of notable changes for add-on developers. They are mostly XPCOM interface removals, some of them currently in use by add-ons listed on AMO. Please have a look and update your add-on code accordingly:

• The encode and decode methods in nsIJSON have been removed. Bug 645922. This fix affects a very large portion of add-ons, so there’s an effort aiming to revert it. Either way, we strongly recommend you to use the global JSON object and the parse and stringify functions instead of the XPCOM component.
• (Updated) The nsINavHistoryObserver and nsINavBoorkmarkObserver interfaces have changed to better accommodate Firefox Sync. Bug 633266. Several of its methods have a new parameter (a GUID). Since add-ons are normally in the observer position, this just means you get more data, so no change is necessary. Binary consumers will need to update the function signatures, though.
• (Updated) A number of methods have been removed from the nsIDOMFile interface, notably getDataAsURL and getAsBinary. Bug 661876. Equivalent functions are available in other objects, like FileReader.
• A few other interfaces were removed: nsIDOM3Node (bug 659053), nsIDOM3TypeInfo (bug 660539), schemaTypeInfo (bug 660539), nsIDOMNSDocument (bug 658906), and nsIDOMDocumentStyle (bug 658904).

More details can be found in Firefox 7 for Developers, as well as some new features that really exciting to have:

• It is now possible to unload JS modules, making them a more viable option for restartless add-ons. Bug 481603.
• Inline preferences. You can now display your preferences panel inside the Add-ons Manager, instead of using a separate window. While there are limitations to what you can do with this, it should work fine for a large subset of add-ons. Plus, it also works for restartless add-ons, which is a big win.

If there are any other compatibility troubles you have run into while testing on Firefox 7 that hasn’t been mentioned here, please leave a comment below.

Firefox 8

It’s still early to worry about Firefox 8, but there are a couple of big changes coming your way that I thought I should mention as soon as possible:

• The nsIDOMWindowInternal interface will be removed. Bug 670235. Judging by the patch, you should be doing QI to nsIDOMWindow instead.
• There is work being done to implement an incremental GC for the JS engine. This could potentially affect add-ons with binary components that use the JSAPI to create a custom JSClass and
  objects of that class, and the objects of the custom class have a custom GC trace function. It sounds fairly specific to actually be common, but I just want to throw this out there in case anybody is affected by it. You can contact me if you need more information about this.

Firefox 8 for developers is already available and should be growing in length in the following weeks.

Summary

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Nominations are currently taking about 3 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 days.
• We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team and helped us cut down review times drastically. Just look at earlier reports for comparison. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

• These stats are taken from the last queue report.
• 101 new nominations that week. 215 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 155 new updates that week. 161 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 109 new preliminary review submissions that week. 140 in the queue awaiting review.
• 841 reviews performed in the month of July so far.

Firefox 5 and 6

I posted a thorough look at breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If there’s anything missing there, please let us know. Make sure to read the comments too!

Firefox 7 and 8

I’ll be posting a Firefox 7 compatibility update shortly after this post. It will also include a couple of early warnings for Firefox 8.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.