Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2010/03/16

Summary

  • These weekly posts explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers. There’s a lengthy overview of the Add-on Review Process posted in this blog as well. We’re just getting started with these, so your feedback is greatly appreciated.
  • Most nominations are being reviewed within 3 weeks. Our goal is to reduce this to 2 weeks before April. At this moment, only 16% of all nominations (30 out of 188) have waited longer than 2 weeks.
  • Almost every update is being reviewed within 5 days. We want to reduce this even more in the future, but nominations are the current priority.

The Review Queues

  • The stats are taken from the latest queue report from last Friday.
  • 77 new nominations that week. 175 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 97 new updates that week. 107 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 543 reviews performed by AMO Editors so far in March. There were 21 editors performing reviews last week.

See the Add-on Review Process and You for information on how to check your current add-on status.

The Review Queues – 6 months ago!

Since I’ve been working for Mozilla for 6 months already, I thought it would be nice to give some perspective of the work I’ve been doing with the editor team and the review queues. So, here are some numbers I got from the (internal) queue reports 6 months ago:

  • 585 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 269 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Roughly 20 editor contributions per day, which would total about 600 per month. That’s less than half of what we do now.

Notes for Developers

  • Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.
  • Bugzilla information for editors. How to file AMO bugs, how to flag bugs relevant for editors, and information on current and future AMO version releases. Let me know if you want to help fixing AMO bugs. Thanks!
  • Support for the signed.applets.codebase_principal_support preference and the enablePrivilege function will be dropped soon. Add-on authors that rely on this feature will need to find alternatives for it immediately, and editors will begin rejecting add-ons that use any of these features very soon.
  • Private Browsing Mode support will soon become a requirement for add-ons that handle browsing data. We will probably start reviewing for PBM support on April 2nd.
  • I’m currently working on porting the XUL School Tutorial for Extension Developers to MDC. This tutorial was originally developed by Glaxstar (now Appcoast) back when I worked for them. I wrote most of it, and now Appcoast has graciously donated the full tutorial contents to Mozilla. I expect to have ported all of the material within this month. If you’re interested in translating the tutorial to another language, please contact me and I’ll help you as much as I can.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla