Add-ons Update – Week of 2011/10/05

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 6 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 10 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 6 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 65 new nominations that week. 317 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 166 new updates that week. 168 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 133 new preliminary review submissions that week. 259 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

In order to reduce waiting times, we have hired a full time AMO Editor, who has been helping us for the past weeks. I expect the improvements to be noticeable on the next report. At this moment waiting times are very bad because there was a recent Firefox release and we’re getting many more updates than usual.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here.

We ran compatibility upgrades to Firefox 7 and Firefox 8, so that as many add-ons as possible have their compatibility set to 8.*. This will also enable all of these add-ons to participate in future compatibility bumps, since we normally only run them for those compatible with Aurora.

Firefox 9

I’ll post on this blog about Firefox 9 compatibility later this week. Most compatibility validation bugs have been filed, and we expect to run the next compatibility bump sometime next week, bringing the majority of our add-ons up to 9.* compatibility.

You can run the standalone compatibility tool if you want to test your add-on yourself or if it isn’t hosted on AMO.

We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 9 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. If you need more information about this, don’t hesitate to ask.