Announcing Add-on SDK 1.14!

I’m terribly pleased to announce the release of Add-on SDK 1.14! You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format.

As I’ve written previously, SDK 1.14 will be the last release of the SDK to include the SDK APIs. Once Firefox 21 ships the version of Firefox you are using will always have the latest and greatest version of the SDK apis. What is more, add-ons packed with Add-on SDK 1.14 will always prefer the APIs embedded in Firefox if they exist, providing a forward-compatibility benefit to developers.

We are working to update Add-on Builder and the Add-on validator on AMO within the next couple of days so that they properly support 1.14. I’ll update the mailing list and twitter once this work has been completed.

What’s new?

  • Initial support for Per-window Private Browsing. Firefox 20 replaces the existing private browsing ‘mode’ with an new feature that allows users to open private windows. A significant amount of work has been done to make this work for SDK-based add-ons.
  • Unique tab ids on both Android and Desktop Firefox, for easier tracking of specific tabs.

You’ll find much more detail about SDK 1.14 in the release notes.

Some interesting stats about this release ( from the Github history between the 1.13.2 & 1.14 tags ):

  • 329 changes in 117 pull requests between tags 1.13.2 and 1.14
  • Special thanks to our community contributors Brett Zamir, Cykesiopka, Dan Stevens, Dương, H. Nguyễn, Gregg Lind, Marc Chevrier and slash_at_ac.auone-net.jp

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

8 responses

  1. Mingyi wrote on :

    I saw that the bug of content scripts for panels can’t console.log was fixed in 1.14, but as I found, no console.log works in 1.14. I tested the same addon with 1.14 vs 1.13.2. In 1.13.2 console.log works in both addon code and content script for panels, but in 1.14, neither works and nothing gets logged. Please verify and fix. Thanks.

    1. Jeff Griffiths wrote on :

      Hi Mingyi,

      Thanks for the report! I apologize, the issue you are running into is a change that we had not tracked properly for documentation, and should have highlighted more clearly in the release notes and related posts. I’ll post something on the blog later regarding this as well. With 1.14 we changed how logging works so that by default you won’t see output produced by console.log. The workaround is to go into about:config and set the preference ‘extensions.sdk.console.logLevel’ to the string ‘all’.

      The log levels defined in the change are: “all”, “debug”, “info”, “warn”, “error”, “off”.

      Reference: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/blob/master/lib/sdk/console/plain-text.js#L18

      1. Mingyi wrote on :

        That’s a very nice feature! This way addon authors can leave those console.log messages in and could simply ask users to turn the config on to report what msgs they see when they encounter issues in addon.

        But yes, indeed if it’s documented in the release docs, it would avoid confusion.

  2. John Nagle wrote on :

    1. The AMO validator is still broken for SDK 1.14. 98 warning messages, mostly the validator complaining about the SDK.

    2. Per the instructions, I updated my add-on by removing the test for private browsing, and not adding the permissions flag for private browsing. So the add-on supposedly won’t run in private browsing mode. With SDK 1.14 and Firefox 19.0.2, it does run in private browsing mode, which is undesirable. So I uploaded the add-on and marked it valid for Firefox 20 and later only. I don’t want it to download into Firefox 19.x versions. Will that work?

    1. KWierso wrote on :

      The new validator hashes have been accepted by AMO, but won’t be deployed until the weekly AMO push this Thursday.

  3. vincenlee wrote on :

    Does the panel model support flash Element? when the panel moudel link to a HTML page which contains a flash,the browser will die.,the I have to kill the progress of firefox to restart it.

    1. Jeff Griffiths wrote on :

      That’s not what should happen – can you please log a bug?

      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Add-on%20SDK

      1. KWierso wrote on :

        Might this be related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768651 ?