Add-ons Update – Week of 2011/09/16

Jorge Villalobos

8 responses

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

The Review Queues

  • Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 4 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

  • 64 new nominations that week. 238 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 228 new updates that week. 279 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 89 new preliminary review submissions that week. 226 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 5 and 6

If you still haven’t updated your add-on, here’s an overview of the breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If you’re a theme developer, also check out this post.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post. The compatibility bump for Firefox 7 was run already, so if your add-on is not compatible yet, we recommend you test and see if any changes are required.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here. We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 8 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. Firefox 9 is coming to Aurora in a couple of weeks, so you should look into this soon.

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.

8 responses

  1. Pete wrote on :

    “We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel…”
    “Firefox 9 is coming to Aurora in a couple of weeks, so you should look into this soon…”

    I’m getting tired of this. What do you think an add-on developer does all the day? Most of the add ons are non profit and once they are done, you cannot expect that someone checks for compatibility every week or even month.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      I’m an add-on developer myself, and I understand your concerns. It sucks to have to tend to your add-on so frequently, which is why I gave this specific recommendation. Most add-ons don’t require any extra work to stay up to date, but they need to be compatible with the Aurora channel so that we can run the automatic checks on them. If you make this effort now, it’s likely that you won’t need to change anything else in several months.

  2. FireShot wrote on :

    Jorge, my FireShot addon contains some binaries, so every release of a new version of Firefox is a nightmare for me.

    Fx 7 is planned to be launched in 27/09 and my addon is still the 230-th in the queue, so I haven’t got any chances to release it on time. It’s used by 260000 users daily so It’s always a big headache for me when the update is not delivered on time due to such long time of reviewing. Can you suggest a quick solution for me and other developers of the addons contained binaries on how to deliver the updates on time? What do I do with my update for Firefox 7.0?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      If your add-on hasn’t been reviewed a couple of days before release, send me a message and I’ll make sure that it is. Add-ons with binaries are handled separately by admins, and their review times are mostly independent from their position in the queue.

      I understand that binary add-on developers have a very hard time now, and we’ll do as much as possible to reduce their difficulties.

  3. Maxine Arnstein wrote on :

    I am using FF 3.6.19 because when I upgrade just to FF 4.0 many of my upgrades did not work and were automatically disabled. Along comes Compatibility Reporter which when I load it all of the add-ons show “not compatible. No contact information is available for the software that I can find.

    So now what? I want to upgrade but all of my add-ons are very helpful and I don’t wish to stop using them.
    Maxine.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      If an add-on is not compatible with Firefox 4 at this point, it’s likely that it is abandoned and will never be updated again. It’s also likely that it won’t work at all in Firefox 4, which was one of the greatest compatibility-breaking updates done to Firefox.

      I recommend that you look on addons.mozilla.org for suitable replacements for these add-ons, since otherwise you’ll need to stick with 3.6 forever, which is bad for you in terms of stability and security. I’d like to know which add-ons aren’t working in 4, perhaps I can help you find good replacements.

  4. john wrote on :

    what happen to wormhole it was the only reason I used seamonkey it was the best

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      What’s wormhole?