Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/01/30

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.

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:

  • 95 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 103 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 101 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 shortly before release.

The Firefox 19 blog post and bump should come soon.

Merging Themes

We finally merged Background Themes (previously known as Personas) and Complete Themes (previously known as Themes) into a single themes category on AMO. However, we made some mistakes with the initial design that made Complete Themes less visible than we intended to, which are being worked on right now. We hope to have a more balanced Themes section in the coming weeks.

6 responses

  1. Aris wrote on :

    Why the review process has stopped? My addon is over three weeks now on the queue, two of them on position “3” and its just a small update.

    Seems to me Mozilla whants every theme author to stop developing.

    A summary of what theme authors have to deal with atm:

    – long taking reviews (really whats wrong?)

    – wait until the (stupid) max version gets unlocked for next FF nightly, so new compatible (dev) versions can be uploaded; “normal” add-ons don’t have to wait

    – major changes of devtools for every major FF release, sometimes a couple of times within nightly/aurora development and themes have to include these changes

    – AMO site detects only “FF finals/betas” (= no xx.0a2 or xx.0a1 version), even if people using nightlies, so newest releases cannot be installed from a themes “versions”-page, because the link is disabled ->> issue reported month ago, nothing happened

    – “addons compatibility reporter”-add-on cannot override themes max version, but allows people to report “theme is not working” feedbacks. Whos idea was this nonsense?

    – losing users/downloaders, because of the above mentioned issues

    – losing users/downloaders, because real themes are now a sub category of personas (yes its still personas, doesn’t matter, what its called now).

    Why Mozilla even has “released” the new merged themes area, if it wasn’t finished AND Mozilla admits to have done major mistakes creating?
    -> If a “release of something” doesn’t work as it should or is broken or whatever, it shoud be reverter, until a fixed/optimized/polished version can be released.

    I don’t know, if other (theme) authors are with me on this, but thats my opinion about the changes made to Firefox and AMO in the last year. Its no fun to work on themes anymore, if you have to deal with a bunch of nonsense restrictions. It seems Mozilla wants to get rid of real themes, or am I wrong?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      long taking reviews (really whats wrong?)

      I assume this is a theme you’re talking about. There are very few reviewers who feel comfortable with reviewing themes. If you want to improve the situation, I recommend that you join our review team and help us with that.

      wait until the (stupid) max version gets unlocked for next FF nightly, so new compatible (dev) versions can be uploaded; “normal” add-ons don’t have to wait

      Well, extension devs to need to wait if they want to set that maxVersion in their install.rdf. You’re right that this is generally not necessary because of default to compatible, which unfortunately can’t be applied to themes.

      AMO site detects only “FF finals/betas” (= no xx.0a2 or xx.0a1 version), even if people using nightlies, so newest releases cannot be installed from a themes “versions”-page, because the link is disabled ->> issue reported month ago, nothing happened

      Is there a bug you can point me to?

      1. Aris wrote on :

        Yes, of course. You made a post there last summer 😉

        https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=770244

        1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

          If a bug doesn’t get any traction after a month or two, there’s no harm in poking in and asking if there’s anything happening. I had totally forgotten about it, to be honest.

  2. Allasso Travesser wrote on :

    Hi, just a question:

    I have been uploading updated versions of my extension while waiting for review. I have 2 newer ones since the one I originally uploaded. Should I delete the 2 earlier ones? I don’t want to do anything that would lose my place in the queue.

    Allasso Travesser

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      No, it’s better not to delete any versions. We can more easily see what has changed in a new version if we have the old ones to diff against. Also, there are some problems that can appear if reviewed versions are deleted, so it’s better to avoid it entirely.