Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/01/09

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.

In case you missed it, give 2012 in Add-on Reviews a look. It’s a good overview of what the review team did last year and how it compares to previous years.

The Review Queues

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 3 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

  • 31 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 36 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 21 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our new reviewer incentives program has become a great motivator for our review team. If you’re an add-on developer, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 18 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 18 is available here. The compatibility bump was run late last week, hopefully with enough time for you to update your add-ons.

Firefox 18 was released already, but automatic updates are throttled for now, so most users are still on 17 and will be for some time.

5 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/01/09”

  1. Brett Zamir wrote on

    I’ve noticed my addon for a few days being #13 in the queue. Then today I see it is #14. Not a big deal, but I’m curious to know when that can happen. Thanks!

    Also, if I can ask here, I was declined from making an addon upgrade because I modified the SDK (and mentioned this). Why is this the case? It’s not like the addon is suddenly not introspectable… Do your validators simply check that the included SDK is valid and if not, reject it entirely? Or do you not check it and believe that a policy will protect you from malicious modifications? If the latter, that seems to be punishing people who are reporting the truth, and not doing anything for security.

    Also, I strongly hope that after waiting all this time for a preliminary review (admittedly in part because I kept updating the addon not realizing for a while that it apparently resets me to the end of the queue), that I can still be given feedback on what I may be able to do to get this accepted at AMO–beyond just “you modified the SDK so do over”. I know I will need to change this, but I am still hoping for a complete enough review that I will not be unpleasantly surprised whenever I may implement all recommendations. Thanks!

    1. Will wrote on

      Brett, usually, my addon climbs up the queue to the teens and then its position fluctuates between 13 and 18 (for as long as two weeks for a full review). I asked in the IRC channel about it and was told that it had to do with a bug related to review requests being canceled and then resubmitted or something like that. In any case, the reviewers just use the queue position as a rough guide and often review things out of order based on what they feel has highest priority and what they have the expertise to review.

      1. Brett Zamir wrote on

        Thanks for the scoop

    2. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      There are some cases where old versions are re-nominated and move immediately to the top of the queue because of the date sorting that the queues implement. This can lead to what you describe.

      As for changing SDK files, we don’t allow it for security reasons. We can easily ignore the SDK if it’s unchanged, and then we just need to focus on the non-SDK files. If there’s a really good reason you need to modify it and there’s no way around it, we might be able to make an exception. In these cases it’s best to reply to the review message so we can have the discussion on the mailing list.

      1. Brett Zamir wrote on

        Ok, sounds good, thanks!