Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2011/08/04

7 responses

I post these updates every 2 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other relevant happenings in the add-ons world.

Summary

  • Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Nominations are currently taking about 3 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
  • We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team and helped us cut down review times drastically. Just look at earlier reports for comparison. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

  • These stats are taken from the last queue report.
  • 85 new nominations that week. 255 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 132 new updates that week. 132 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 126 new preliminary review submissions that week. 135 in the queue awaiting review.
  • 1834 reviews performed in the month of July (updated).

Compatibility

The release schedule is available here. The next push is currently scheduled for August 16th. This will be the release date for Firefox 6, the push of Firefox 7 to the beta channel, and the push of Firefox 8 to the Aurora channel.

The AMO compatibility push for Firefox 7 was run less than a week ago. A last minute change (to revert the JSON interface changes) and some bugs on our tools delayed the push significantly. We hope to run the Firefox 8 compatibility push shortly after the Aurora push, in a couple of weeks.

On this front, you should also look into this proposal by Justin Scott, to make add-ons compatible by default after Firefox updates. It’s based on the idea that most add-ons won’t require any code changes to work satisfactorily in new versions of Firefox, specially considering the small changes between releases. Please add your questions, show your support, etc. in the linked discussion.

Firefox 5 and 6

I posted a thorough look at breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If there’s anything missing there, please let us know.

Firefox 7 and 8

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 7 was published some time. It mentions a couple of possible changes in Firefox 8, one of which might be reverted as well (the nsIDOMWindowInternal removal). The detailed compatibility post for Firefox 8 will be published close to its push to Aurora.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.

7 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2011/08/04”

  1. Mark Smith wrote on

    Has the 7.* automated compatibility check been run for all add-ons that were compatible with 6.*? We received a report (and a bump to 7.*) for some add-ons but not for this one:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-box/

    I can mark it as compatible with 7.*, but I wonder if there was a problem with the automated check process.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Either your email filtered the message for that specific add-on, or something went wrong with the validation and your add-on wasn’t validated. You should be able to see if there are any compatibility problems if you go to your Developer Tools and revalidate your latest version. You can do this from the Status & Versions section.

  2. Jose Luis wrote on

    Sorry if it is not the right place for asking about my problem.
    I want to communicate several libraries written in C++ with a Javascript application and I have compiled xpcom/sample as an example but it doesn’t work: if i run the C++ test (nsTestSample), the C++ functions inside the extension are called, but if I use xpconnect-sample.html they aren’t. I am using firefox 5.0 release. Thanks a lot

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      I recommend you try posting here: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.extensions/topics?lnk&pli=1

      1. Jose Luis wrote on

        Thank you. I will try

  3. Andy Reyes wrote on

    I got burned with the Google toolbar issue when I installed Firefox 5. I know that you are not responsible for updating the add ons, but if I had known that going to Firefox 5 meant that I could no longer use the Google toolbar, I would not have installed it. I am now using the toolbar by having compatibility testing disable and have has no problems, but I do not like running that way.

    I would like to go to Firefox 6 since it has some security improvements, but I am afraid that some other add on will become incompatible and, unlike the Google Toolbar, it will be truly incompatible.

    Id there any way to be able to tell ahead of time if the add ons I have installed are incompatible with a new version of Firefox, and if so are there any upgrades available? I guess that what I am asking is if there is a way to run the compatibility checking that Firefox does after the new release is installed without actually installing the new release.

    It would be nice if as part of the installation the user (maybe optionally) would be presented with a list of add ons that are installed that will be incompatible and if there are any upgrades available. That way we can make an informed decision as to what to do.

    1. Michael Greene wrote on

      I absolutely agree with Andy Reyes comment about tell the user prior to going ahead with the install as to which add-ons are incompatiable and for which there are no updates currently available. I just installed yesterday and most of my add-ons were disabled and I can’t even get the add-ons screen to work to check for updates. Unless something like this comes with the next major release, as much as I like Firefox I’ll probably move to another browser. I’m so tired of having all my add-ons disabled by Firefox. Firefox seems to being losing its focus on user productivity for all the hype area like speed. Who really cares about speed at this point if you cannot performs your work???