Add-ons Update – Week of 2012/11/07

Jorge Villalobos

6 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

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 2 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 5 days.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

  • 27 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 30 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 30 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our new reviewer incentives program has been very successful. Volunteer activity has increased significantly and expanded into other areas of contribution. While some reviews are still taking days to be looked at, the majority are being reviewed within the same day.

If you’re an add-on developer, please consider joining our team. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 17 Compatibility

The landing of bug 553102 made major change that can break compatibility for many add-ons. In a nutshell, if you set expando properties in JS objects in the content that point to chrome objects, you need to explicitly add the properties to the __exposedProps__ list of that object. A deprecation warning was added in Firefox 15. There’s more information here.

The compatibility post will be up later this week and the validation and bump will happen next week.

6 responses

  1. Milton Beychok wrote on :

    I have been using Firefox for over 4 years. Recently, without any prior notice, I was updated to the version 16.0.2. Also, no notification of any kind after the update.

    (1) I have been using the NewTabURL extension for at least 3 years and have been very, very happy with it. After the update to 16.0.2, the NewTabURL extension does not work. Whenever I click for a new tab, I get a completely blank new tab. That happens whether I disable or I enable my latest version of NewTabURL …. I get completely blank new tabs whatever I try.

    Is there any way for me to make the NewTabURL work in Firefox 16.0.2 ? If not, is there any way that the developer of that extension can revise it so that it works in 16.0.2 ?

    (2) Am I going to get any more compatibility surprises when my Firefox gets updated to 17 … again with no prior notification ? How can I stop the automatic updating of my browser without any notification ? I have always selected the option of “Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them” … but it seems to always be ignored.

    (3) Is there any way for me to to go back to an earlier version of Firefox so that the NewTabURL extension will work? Or has something been done to my “profile” or my “prefs.js” that would prevent NewTabURL from working?

    I am no computer guru … just a plain vanilla ordinary user. And I am beginning to get fed up.

    Milton Beychok

  2. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

    (1) Look in about:config for a preference called “browser.newtab.url” and reset it to its default value. If you still see blank pages, it means the extension in incompatible with Firefox 16. In that case I recommend looking for a compatible new tab add-on on AMO. If you want to keep using NewTabURL, you can either roll back to a previous version of Firefox or look into some of the recommendations in the reviews for the add-on.

    (2) Changing the update settings should work. I don’t know why you got updated without a prompt.

    (3) See (1). You can find old versions of Firefox here.

    1. Milton Beychok wrote on :

      Jorge, where is “about:config” ? Please give me explicit instructions on how to find it! And once I find it, what is the “default value” of “browser.newtab.url” ?

      Thanks in advance.

      Milton Beychok

      1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

        Sorry for the short explanation. Just type “about:config” without the quotes in the URL bar, like if you were visiting a website. Type “browser.newtab.url” without quotes in the filter box and you’ll see the preference. If it is set to “about:newtab”, then it’s ok. If not, you can right-click on it and choose the Reset option.

  3. Milton Beychok wrote on :

    Thanks, Jorge. The preference is set at “about:newtab” and I still get blank pages … so I guess that I will roll back to an earlier version.

    Would you happen to know that if I uninstall my current version of Firefox and then install the 10.0 version, will the NewTabURL extension be compatible and work properly?

    The creater of NewTabURL is “sogame”. I emailed them about rolling back to the 10.0 version twice in the last few days, but got no response. Perhaps you can get them to respond better than I can. I would very much appreciate it if you tried to contact them for me.

    Milton Beychok

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      Uninstalling the current version and installing 10 should make the add-on work, if it works on 10 of course.