Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/05/20

4 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 10 weeks to review.
  • 194 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 6 weeks.
  • 112 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 9 weeks.
  • 222 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 was already run. There’s a second blog post covering the upcoming 38.0.5 release and in-content preferences, which were an oversight in the first post.

Firefox 39 Compatibility

The Firefox 39 compatibility blog post is up. I don’t know when the compatibility validation will be run yet.

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. A followup post was published recently, addressing some of the reasons behind this initiative.

A couple notable things are happening related to signing:

  • Signing will be enabled for AMO-listed add-ons. This means that new versions will be automatically signed, and the latest versions of all listed add-ons will also be signed. Expect this to happen within a week or so (developers will be emailed when this happens). Signing for unlisted (non-AMO) add-ons is still not enabled.
  • The signature verification code is now active on Developer Edition, in case you want to try it out with unsigned extensions. The preference is set to warn about unsigned extensions, but still accept and install them. You can use Developer Edition to test your extensions after we let you know they’ve been signed.
  • A new Developer Agreement will be published on AMO. This is a significant update over the current years-old agreement, covering signing, listed and unlisted add-ons, themes, and other developments that have happened since. Developers will be notified when the new agreement is up.

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 2015/05/20”

  1. IBT wrote on

    So, all of the add-ons in my add-on list have the word ‘SIGNED’ next to them, does this mean that their developers have all agreed to the new system and that they are good to go?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      It means those add-ons have been signed on AMO and shouldn’t be a problem when Firefox starts enforcing signatures.

  2. A M wrote on

    > In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running each content tab in a different one.

    I believe this is incorrect. Firefox will still run all content tabs in the same process. However, this process will be separate from the main Firefox process, which is the difference.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      That’s a configuration option that will probably be tweaked in the future. You are correct in how things work now, but in general developers should assume there’s a different process per tab.