Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2010/09/14

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 1 week.
  • Almost every update is being reviewed within 5 days.

The Review Queues

  • The stats are taken from the latest queue report from last Friday.
  • 48 new nominations that week. 60 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 62 updates that week. 49 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 323 reviews performed by AMO Editors this month. There were 12 editors performing reviews last week.

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

Firefox 4 Compatibility

Firefox 4 is coming later this year, and beta 5 is currently available for download. This will be the most difficult upgrade path for add-on yet, so everybody should keep an eye on beta updates and all the documentation that is being published. At the moment these are the most useful documentation resources:

I’ll do my best to keep everybody up to date with breaking changes in Firefox 4, and I will post a new compat update when we’re closer to RC1. In the interim I’ll use these reports to post all the new (sometimes unconfirmed) feedback I’ve received, with as much information I have at hand. Here are the notes I have so far:

  • Beta 6 is coming, and it will be the first beta after feature freeze. This means that no major features will be added to Firefox after this release, and all releases following it will be dedicated to fixing bugs, regressions, optimizations and cleanup. I will be messaging all developers that have 3.6-compatible versions and haven’t been following the betas.
  • As of Beta 5, Firefox has a new User Agent String.
  • Firefox 4 will support the 32 and 64-bit Intel architectures on Mac, and has dropped PPC support. List of supported platforms.
  • As mentioned before, Remote XUL over HTTP and over the file:// protocol has been disabled by default. There’s a simple API that allows you to whitelist individual domains in case you still need it.
  • The channel redirection API has been changed to be asynchronous. This can break add-ons that deal with low-level networking functions.
  • Toolbar customization. There’s a bug in toolbar customization that can revert changes performed by users. Note that the bug can be triggered by add-ons that access certain browser features before the onload event is fired. If this is the case for your add-on, please read the comments on the linked bug carefully.

Notes for Developers

  • Add-on Performance at XUL School. This article is highly recommended to all developers. It explains a few methods to improve add-on performance, including how to easily measure startup times.
  • 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.
  • Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

2 comments on “Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2010/09/14”

  1. Nils Maier wrote on

    Also a noteworthy compatibility change for some developers is that
    extensions are no longer unpacked by default, but instead stay packaged in an XPI the whole time. Unless you explicitly opt-out.
    If you ship binary components, rely on window icons or need to read files contained in your package via file streams or the like then you’ll be interested in this:
    http://blog.mozilla.org/mwu/2010/09/10/extensions-now-installed-packed/

    Further reading about performance improvements, and why the omnijar cannot be opened by lots of popular archiver tools like 7-zip:
    http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/2010/09/14/firefox-4-jar-jar-jar/

  2. Michael Lefevre wrote on

    “Beta 6 is coming, and it will be the first beta after feature freeze.”

    As I guess you know by now, it was decided some hours before your blog post to insert a beta 6 into the schedule (more of a beta5.0.1 release), so that it’s now beta 7 which will be the first after the feature freeze.