Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/02/29

5 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

We managed to empty the queues!

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 3 days to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 3 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 days.

These stats are taken from last week’s queue report:

  • 19 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 15 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 10 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re interested in joining the AMO Editors team and help us review add-ons, please visit our wiki page.

Test Your Add-ons for Memory Leaks!

The MemShrink team was assembled some time ago to work on reducing Firefox’s memory footprint. Many memory bugs have been filed and fixed for Firefox, but add-ons are also a significant factor in how much memory is being used.

There is an ongoing effort to track and stomp memory leaks in add-ons. Here’s where you can help, either by testing the add-ons you created, or testing the add-ons you use. Please read the article on Zombie Compartments, particularly the add-ons section. It should give you some pointers on how to find leaks and how to avoid them. The short version is don’t hold any references to DOM objects after the document is closed.

The AMO review team is already aware of this, and we have added memory leaks to our testing policies. Add-on versions that leaks may not get full review.

If you have any questions about this, post them in the comments.

Firefox 11

The Firefox 11 compatibility blog post has been up for a while.

The compatibility bump will be run very soon, but it will be run differently than last time. It has been greatly delayed due to some bugs on our side, but we’re working on resolving them ASAP.

Since Firefox 10 and above have add-on compatibility turned on by default, there’s no longer a need to do maxVersion bumping. So, we’re going to do run the usual compatibility checks, but only email developers if their add-ons don’t pass some of the checks. These add-ons that don’t will also be added to the compatibility override list so users know they are incompatible, provided that the compatibility bug really causes problems in the way the add-on works.

Firefox 12

The Firefox 12 compatibility updates are coming very soon. I’m already working on them.

5 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/02/29”

  1. Nicholas Nethercote wrote on

    And w.r.t. memory leaks, feel free to join in the fun of testing the top 100 add-ons, at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730737.

  2. frank wrote on

    If SDK itself cause the memory leak. What sure we do?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      We don’t deny approval to add-ons that have leaks that originate from the SDK. There are actually many add-ons at the moment that have this same problem. The memory leaks in the SDK should be fixed in version 1.6, which should be released soon. Once that version is out, we will encourage all developers to upgrade, specially those with add-ons that leak because of it.

      1. frank wrote on

        My add-on got preliminarily reviewed. not full reviewed because of this. I believe the problem is come from SDK . What shall I do? I tried some of full reviewed Addons which base on SDK, all have same problem.

        1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

          Which add-on is it? Send me an email to jorge AT mozilla DOT com if you want to discuss this privately.