Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2014/07/30

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 6 weeks to review.
  • 81 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 4 weeks.
  • 61 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.
  • 61 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

The length of the queues has improved significantly thanks to a couple of new reviewers. We could always use more help, so please read below about how to join our group.

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 31 Compatibility

The Firefox 31 compatibility update is here. The automatic compatibility validations were run as well.

Firefox 32 Compatibility

For Firefox 32, expect the compatibility blog post sometime within the next week, and compatibility validation should follow a week or two later.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis, also known as e10s, is the next major compatibility change coming to Firefox. In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running each content tab in a different one. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

We will be talking more about these changes in this blog in the near future. We will also begin contacting developers about add-ons malfunctioning with e10s very soon. For now, you can help us test add-ons during the upcoming Add-on Compatibility Test Day, on August 1st. If you want to test your own add-on, the Test Day etherpad has instructions on how to activate e10s on a Nightly profile.

6 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2014/07/30”

  1. Peter Sloetjes wrote on

    One remark on the message manager interface for e10s: It seems that, in order to be able to upgrade content scripts, non-SDK bootstrapped add-ons that use the ‘nsIMessageListenerManager’ service would need to have access to a synchronous ‘unloadFrameScript’ function which first emits a synchronous ‘unload’ message and then destroys the script context. Perhaps this function could be added? Thanks! P.S. Please let me know if there is a better way to achieve this.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      What I’ve been doing for a ‘test’ add-on of mine is send an async unload message to all tabs and remove the frame script. It’s buggy, yes. I haven’t looked at the Message Manager API recently, but I will be doing that in the coming weeks. That sounds like a good suggestion, if it hasn’t been included yet (I need to check).

  2. Bernd Korz wrote on

    Hi,
    we requested a full review on the 25th of June (alugha is the name of the plugin) and since more than 10 days we are on 25 of XX. Nothing happens 🙁

    Can we get any status of it?

    Thx in advanced.
    alugha Team

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Since your add-on has binary or obfuscated code, it will require an admin reviewer to look at it. Unfortunately this means that your review will take longer than normal, at least for the first version. I’m sorry about the delays, but I can’t give you an accurate estimate on when it will be reviewed.

      1. Bernd Korz wrote on

        So it is again 10 days in the pest since i asked, we went from #17 to #22. Honestly i am a really patient person but this starts to be a joke 🙁

        “Take longer than normal”…. well, as it seems it always is pushed backwards and other add-ones get driven up 🙁

        We also sent you the source code of the Add-On…

        best regards,
        alugha.

        1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

          Some add-ons are moved to the top of the queue for various reasons. This shouldn’t really slow down the review for your add-on, since reviews aren’t done in strict order.