Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2010/07/20

Summary

  • These bi-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 that should be read as a general guide about the review process.
  • Most nominations are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
  • Almost every update is being reviewed within 1 week.
  • The Mozilla Summit invited the most active contributors in the AMO Editors team. It was great and also very productive to meet them finally in person, but the review queues suffered noticeably because of that week we lost. It also didn’t help that Firefox 4 beta 1 was released just a day or two before the Summit. Major version releases trigger an unusually large number of new submissions and updates.  We’re catching up at the moment, but things will be slow for at least a couple of weeks.

The Review Queues

  • The stats are taken from the latest queue report from last Friday.
  • 50 new nominations that week. 129 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 100 updates that week. 101 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 317 reviews performed by AMO Editors this month. There were 15 editors performing reviews last week.

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

Notes for Developers

  • How to Improve Extension Startup Performance. All extension developers should read this blog post. It explains how extensions can have a significant impact in startup performance and, some very simple steps you can follow to minimize this impact. There’s also a link to some tools that can be used to easily measure startup.
  • Firefox 4 is coming, and with it there are a number of platform changes that will need to be addressed by extension authors. We will increase communication as the launch date becomes clearer, but in the meantime, you should be aware of these: Add-ons Manager with Asynchronous API, Changes in XPCOM, Remote XUL to be RemovedJSM can now be included in chrome JARs. A more detailed post will be published in this blog later this week.
  • New Proposal for Review Process and Delightful Add-ons. This is a new and different approach to resolve the issue of add-on safety in the sandbox and code reviews. All add-on developers should read this and give feedback. It’s been a long process to try to find the right balance of the many elements involved, and we think this is it.
  • The AMO Editor Guide. This new page in the wiki is a comprehensive guide to the work performed by AMO Editors. It will serve as an introductory guide for new editors, and is a step forward in being as transparent as possible with our review process.
  • AMO is currently being migrated to a new code base, some of which is already live in production. If you notice any strange behavior on the site , please make sure to file a bug (see note below about AMO bug reporting).
  • 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.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

2 responses

  1. Alexandr wrote on :

    This article explains a lot
    did not prevent it, such statistics indicate when adding new versions and nominate new extensions
    that there were no questions like “how long to wait?”

  2. dan hayes wrote on :

    since about july 26 download helper will not work in youtube when bring up a video to watch and download . Before about july 20 or so it worked . Now i remember
    there was an upgrade or something that made it NOT work and now i see there is NO entry in control panel in winxp as far as installed programs which
    SHOULD have been there so now I can’t uninstall the original with those upgrades. Why do these jerks make an upgrade that is much worse than the prior
    one since it won’t work on youtube though it did work on another place i tried. NOw I don’t even remember exactly which one of the download helper’s i originally
    downloaded as there are many different types and versions of download helper in the add-ons. and i can’t find which one as the jerks at firefox did not put any entry into
    control panel add/remove software!!