Add-ons Update – Week of 2013/05/15

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 3 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 1 week.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 1 week.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

  • 88 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 59 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 57 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, 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 21 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 21 is up, and the the compatibility bump for AMO add-ons was run last week. Firefox 21 was released yesterday, so all compatibility updates should be uploaded to AMO as soon as possible, if they haven’t been already.

As usual we recommend using the Aurora and Beta branches to test your add-ons ahead of time.

ESR Compatibility

There are a couple of compatibility issues that are related to the ESR and other business deployments that are worth mentioning:

  • In Firefox 21, certain folders in the Firefox install directory where moved under browser/. You can read more about it on this bug. This affects installers that drop add-ons or other customizations in the install directory.
  • We’re planning on changing the version number scheme for ESR releases. The idea is that, if we have ESR 24, ESR version 24.1 would be the security upgrade that corresponds to Firefox 25. This way it is easier to associate an ESR version with its mainline equivalent in security patches. For add-ons, this means that maxVersions should always be in the form 24.*, rather than 24.0.*. This is especially important for add-ons with binary components, which don’t have default compatibility.