Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/02/15

Jorge Villalobos

6 responses

Summary

  • These posts written every 2 weeks explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers.
  • A few weeks ago, a new version of the Developer Tools was pushed live at AMO. It includes a new review process among a ton of other changes. More information here.
  • Nominations at the moment are being processed very slowly. The new review system required hundreds of add-on developers to renominate their add-ons, which has placed a large workload on the editor team. Nominations have been delayed at least a couple of weeks.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 7 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 15 days.

The Review Queues

  • These stats are taken from the last queue report. Preliminary queue stats are still pending.
  • 58 new nominations that week. 194 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 74 new updates that week. 62 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 985 reviews have been performed by AMO Editors this month.

Firefox 4 Compatibility

Firefox 4 will be released very soon, beta 10 is currently available for download and AMO already supports 4.0.* as a valid maxVersion. Most of the necessary documentation to upgrade your add-on for Firefox 4 is readily available:

Beta 7 was the first release after the codebase went through feature freeze. This means that no major changes are going to be performed, and add-ons that work correctly on current betas are likely to work in the same way until the final release. Here are some pending issues of Firefox 4 compatibility that haven’t been addressed in other blog posts:

  • Since toolbar buttons are very important for developers and button sizes changed for Firefox 4, I wrote this analysis of toolbar buttons and icons in Firefox 4. One problem was brought up in the comments, which triggered the creation of bug 616472. The bug and other related ones have been fixed on the latest betas. I’ll post an update on this topic very soon, so stay put.
  • The Add-on Bar is supposed to appear automatically when a button or other items are added to it. Bug 616419 was filed for this. It doesn’t look like it will be fixed soon, but an alternate solution is proposed in the comments.

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. It’s currently being edited to adjust it to the upcoming review system.
  • 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

6 responses

  1. Neil Rashbrook wrote on :

    Is there an explanation of the addon validation warnings anywhere?

    1. Jorge wrote on :

      There are two places:
      1) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/validation
      This one details the flags picked up by a previous version of the validator, but they’re still valid.
      2) https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO:Editors/EditorGuide/AddonReviews#Step_2:_Automatic_validation
      This one explains which actions we normally take for different flags.

      1. IByte wrote on :

        Sorry for my duplicate comment below, Jorge. That will teach me to refresh before I reply…

      2. Neil Rashbrook wrote on :

        Unfortunately neither of the links were helpful. My add-on had 22 warnings in total. I understand the warning about my add-on being so old it uses a .jar file without , and it doesn’t have , which is something that I’d simply overlooked. The unchanged translation entries is warning about de-DE and de-AT so that’s unsurprising. But it then goes and complains about “Global called in dangerous manner” and “Global overwrite”. I’m guessing that the second warning is designed for overlays but I don’t understand the first warning.

      3. Neil Rashbrook wrote on :

        Bah, your blog thought I was trying to use <em> but I was trying to say “I understand the warning about my add-on being so old it uses a .jar file without <em:unpack>, and it doesn’t have <em:type>, which is something that I’d simply overlooked.”

    2. IByte wrote on :

      Yes, I think this page has what you’re looking for: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/validation