Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/05/03

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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

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 1 month 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:

  • 192 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 84 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 159 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

As you can see, we’re in need for some help. If you’re an experienced add-on developer and you would like to see the queues move along faster, please consider joining our team. Visit our wiki page for more information.

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 leak generally won’t get full review.

There are also great news from the MemShrink camp. With the resolution of bug 695480, whole classes of compartment leaks have been resolved on the Firefox side. This means that even if an add-on holds on to DOM references when it shouldn’t, they will be properly claimed. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test and fix your code! This fix will be introduced in Firefox 15, so it’s some away anyway.

Firefox 12 Compatibility

The Firefox 12 compatibility blog post is up. It also includes some major changes coming in Firefox 13, so make sure to give it a read. The Firefox 12 compatibility bump should happen very soon.

The compatibility work for Firefox 13 is still pending. I promise to finish it soon!

2 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/05/03”

  1. blabla wrote on

    >This means that even if an add-on holds on to DOM references when it shouldn’t, they will be properly claimed. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test and fix your code!

    But this fix causes bustage in other (non-leaking) add-ons. I think this should be mentioned.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Can you give an example of this? Have you commented on the bug?