Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
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Firefox 3.6 is here! Are your add-ons up to date?

15 responses

When Firefox 3.6 beta 1 came out, I let you know that you should start working on your add-on compatibility for 3.6. Did you listen? No? Well, then you’re going to start hearing from your users, because Firefox 3.6 is now officially out. Within a few days most of the world will be up to date, and your add-ons should be up to date, too.

The add-on review queues are normally very busy during update times, so you should follow these guidelines to make sure your add-on stays up to date and doesn’t have to wait too long for a review:

  1. Visit Firefox 3.6 for developers and read all about the changes that have been introduced in Firefox 3.6. Some additional information for theme authors is available in this forum topic.
  2. Test your add-on with the final release of 3.6 and see if there are any compatibility problems. Most add-ons should be fine.
  3. If the current version of your add-on doesn’t show any compatibility issues, you don’t need to upload a new version. Visit the Developer Hub: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/ and change the “max version” value in the latest version of your add-on (it’s in the Versions and Files section). That’s all it takes. Make sure to set your max version to 3.6.*.
  4. If you need to update your add-on for 3.6, submit your update as soon as possible. There will be an update rush happening soon, and it will probably take a while for the AMO editor team to catch up.

Also, if you have binary components, some important changes have been made to the C API which might affect your add-ons. Make sure you build your add-on against the newest SDK, which is version 1.9.2. The new SDK should be available in the Gecko SDK page.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post here, or at the new AMO forum.

Happy coding!

15 comments on “Firefox 3.6 is here! Are your add-ons up to date?”

  1. mambus wrote on

    I am not a developer, but I want to say that 9 out of 10 of my add ons are not working. Kinda useless now.

  2. Jay wrote on

    Awesome!

  3. Wladimir Palant wrote on

    One of the add-ons I was using wasn’t working because it didn’t have a chrome.manifest file. Yuk…

  4. Nickolay Ponomarev wrote on

    Unfortunately (and confusingly!) if you uploaded a version that was detected as “beta” (e.g. 0.5a),
    1) the users updating to Firefox 3.6 will not see this version, even if the version they have is not compatible with 3.6;
    2) there’s no way to promote the “beta” version to a “release” version without re-uploading it;
    3) and the “beta” version wasn’t in the review queue, so even if it was released a while ago, it enters the review queue only after I reupload it as a “release” version.

    Of course, this is documented at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/policies/maintenance , but I didn’t see that page when submitting a version that was detected a “beta”.

    Anyway, this use-case is not served very well by the add-ons site: existing users on Firefox 3.5 keep using the stable version, while the users upgrading to a newer version of Firefox get an update of the extension automatically.

  5. Mark wrote on

    Hello,
    I used to use Qute theme and personas. Qute icons were clearer and nicer. Personas enabled a nice back drop of color. What has happened in 3.6? It’s either or. What can I do to fix this? I don’t like the default icons… and I do like the personas back drop.
    Thx…

  6. Johannes wrote on

    3.6 does not support handwriting pad input of chinese charactors at Windows XP

  7. Spatt wrote on

    There’s still 4 addons that wasn’t updated till now. Wonder when they’re updating it. Thanks for an awesome browser!

  8. Become a not so firefox fan now wrote on

    This is really the results of stupidity of the FireFox developers.
    What are they thinking ? Every time, I upgrade to the next version,
    I “always” have had the problems with add-ons, because of incompatibility.
    Now, I really have to give credit and two-thumbs up to MicroSoft guys.
    And two thumbs down to FireFox.
    In this way, FireFox is sure to disappear soon…

  9. Ritchard Christian wrote on

    i have 6 addons essential (IMO) out of six … that are not compatible with Firefox 6 … therefore i will NOT update to the 6.0 version.

  10. Jorge wrote on

    @Ritchard Christian: which add-ons are those, if you could tell us?

  11. teo wrote on

    It is a shame that an update of Firefox breaks compatibility with old plugins. This is a serious flaw in the design of the plugin system.

    And instead of apologizing for not maintaining backward compatibility, they even blame the plugin developers for not staing up to date???

    “Did you listen? No? Well, then you’re going to start hearing from your users”
    Really? Or maybe _you_ will start hearing from users!

    Why should the developers of a plugin do the effort of eternally updating their plugin (even if it worked just fine, even if it didn’t need any improvement) just to stay up with Firefox’s updates?? That’s crazy.
    It should be the concern of the developers of Firefox to provide backward compatibility.

    Would you imagine if all software written for Windows Vista stopped working under Windows 7????

    And note I am not a plugin developer, I am a user

  12. Foxtion – Jabla wrote on

    Totally agree with Teo quote: “Why should the developers of a plugin do the effort of eternally updating their plugin (even if it worked just fine, even if it didn’t need any improvement)…It should be the concern of the developers of Firefox to provide backward compatibility.”

    I have 4 extensions. (created 4 years ago) Which I seem to be “eternally updating”. I uploaded 2 addons to Mozilla 2 days ago, passed all 11 tests. In 3.6.2 they are not working (although they passed the tests) even worse they are crashing the browser and I have heaps of emails already telling me they are not working. Time consuming answering them. Been at the developers site since trying to figure out why. We need better examples on EXACTLY what to change to fit with whatever version.
    I know what I have to add/change now but it has taken a few hours of research.

    New versions seem to always be about fixing security holes. Be better to fix security holes for extensions browser side.

    Extensions are what have made firefox so popular!
    Extension developers program give their extensions away for FREE!

    Some may make small affiliate commissions, but most do it because this is fun for a geek. It is starting not to be fun.
    I want to play my guitar LOL!

    1. Sachin Deep wrote on

      yes you right. we are facing lot of issue with backward compatibility.

  13. Wowbagger wrote on

    …aaaaaaand I’m done. I’m going to keep updating along with Firefox, but I’m done installing add-ons. The MANDATORY REQUIRED ADD-ON UPDATES OR WE WILL DISABLE THEM are constant and don’t work half the time anyway. Just now I discovered that the uninstall button on about half of them disabled, and all my favorite extensions went down with the 3.6 update (which I finally did last week). This happens several times a year now, and the REASON I moved to FF is because it was less of a time-consuming headache to use than IE.

    So I quit. Sorry, add-on guys. You do great work, but the Mozilla Foundation — which has generally speaking put together an excellent browser — is not serving you well here. I’ll keep Firebug and Live HTTP Headers running for as long as I can, but, so help me, if those ever go down I’m moving to Chrome.

  14. johnson_spoon wrote on

    The pinnacle of my Mozilla experience was when I was using FF 2.1 with Adblock and cookie management.

    Ever since then, Mozilla wants to upgrade my browser every week or two, and none of my plugins will work.

    If it ain’t broke, why fix it?