Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/04/08

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 9 weeks to review.
  • 216 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 4 weeks.
  • 56 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 8 weeks.
  • 198 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 38 Compatibility

The Firefox 38 compatibility blog post is up. The automatic AMO validation will be run soon.

Firefox 39 Compatibility

I expect to publish the Firefox 39 compatibility blog post in the next week or so.

As always, we recommend that you test your add-ons on Beta and Firefox Developer Edition (formerly known as Aurora) to make sure that they continue to work correctly. End users can install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter to identify and report any add-ons that aren’t working anymore.

Extension Signing

We announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox. If you’re an extension developer, please read the post and participate in the discussions. We will be posting a followup expanding on the reasons behind this initiative.

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 future. For now we recommend you start looking at the available documentation.

4 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/04/08”

  1. Bjoern wrote on

    1. Will the UNBRANDED RELEASE be available for the GNU/Linux or *BSD distributions?
    2. WHY is the UNBRANDED RELEASE only available for the en-US locale?
    3. If UNBRANDED RELEASE is not going to be available for GNU/Linux or *BSD distributions, and only available for the en-US locale; will those of us living in GNU/Linux, &/or *BSD, &/or non-en-US realms be able build from the Firefox Source Code and disable the signing feature?

    4. VERY, VERY Disappointed that you prefer to encourage us to use a Google based page to thrash out these issues.

    1. Daniel Veditz wrote on

      “4. VERY, VERY Disappointed that you prefer to encourage us to use a Google based page to thrash out these issues.”

      I suppose Jorge figured people reading a web page would want a web link, but like most of our developer forums it’s accessible through mail and traditional newsgroups. The Google Group mirroring is for convenience of those who can only reach the web. Here’s where to find that group in alternate forms:
      https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/forums/#addons.user-experience

      1. Bjoern wrote on

        1. My apologies to Jorge. My reply was intended for Daniel’s post. Must have got my wires crossed in haste.

        2. Thanks Daniel for the reply. I’ve looked at the link again at the end of your post, and found the mailing list option.

  2. msrsw wrote on

    bug – mail merge 3.10.00 broken, reinstalled 3.9.1 and it’s working.