Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/08/12

11 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.

Add-ons Forum

As we announced before, there’s a new add-ons community forum for all topics related to AMO or add-ons in general. The old forum is still available in read-only mode, but will be permanently taken down by the end of the month.

The Review Queues

  • Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.
  • 330 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 10 weeks.
  • 128 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 12 weeks.
  • 360 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

The unlisted queues aren’t mentioned here, but they are empty for the most part. We’re in the process of getting more help to reduce queue length and waiting times for the listed queues. There are many new volunteer reviews joining us now, and a part-time contractor who should help us with the longest-waiting add-ons in the queues.

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 40 Compatibility

The Firefox 40 compatibility blog post is up. The automatic compatibility validation was run last weekend. I apologize for the delay, we’re making some changes to ensure that we run them more in advance of the release.

Firefox 41 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post should come up soon.

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. The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions.

The new add-on installation UI and signature warnings are now enabled in release versions of Firefox. Signature enforcement will be turned on in 41 (with a pref to disable), and the pref will be removed on 42. The wiki page has all the details.

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 content code in a different process than browser code. 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. We recommend you look at the available documentation and adapt your add-on code as soon as possible.

11 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/08/12”

  1. custom.firefox.lady wrote on

    Quick question on extension signing: What’s the plan for beta add-ons currently on the dev channel on AMO? New uploads get signed if they pass validation (or has that changed?) , but what about the most recent pre-existing dev version? I’m hoping to be able to use these on the Fx beta channel.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      New beta versions are automatically signed. Older versions aren’t signed, so developers should upload new versions so users can update to them.

  2. SAH wrote on

    Jorge,

    This is re: extension signing.
    FF 41 is scheduled for 9/22 release. It seems to me that when the user upgrades to FF 41, any unsigned/non-Mozilla signed extensions it will be automatically disabled. Is that the plan?

    Mind you, extensions that aren’t even hosted on AMO would be affected. Some extensions providers would lose thousands of users instantaneously!

    It would be nice if the existing/legacy extensions (the ones that the user already has installed) could be grandfathered in.
    – The ‘legacy’ extensions might not have auto-update capability (no listed – admittedly, an extension design flaw)
    – The user might have extension auto-updating disabled.

    Thoughts?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Add-ons that aren’t hosted on AMO can be submitted for signing (see the linked wiki page), and we have a good portion of the add-ons already signed. There’s still much to do in this area, however.

  3. Anthony Wells wrote on

    We just submitted an extension under the email account l used for this comment.

    It’s not really an extension, it’s a client application invoked from the -chrome command-line argument that talks to an ERP server application.

    I’m not sure how you’re going to deal with reviewing extensions-as-applications, I don’t know how many of us are out there using XUL in that manner (probably few and far between), and maybe it’s something that needs to be thought about in the code review process. I saved the results of the automated test and will work on getting us a clean pass, so maybe that’s all that’s required.

    If you need anything from me, just let me know, and thanks in advance.

    1. Anthony Wells wrote on

      Answering my own question here. Spent a couple of days fixing everything the automated test suite complained about and re-submitted and we got signed.

      Hopefully “deleting” our previous submission is sufficient to de-queue it. Right now it’s showing “incomplete”.

      1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

        “Incomplete” doesn’t sound right. Please contact us at amo-admins AT mozilla DOT org.

        1. Anthony Wells wrote on

          Done and done.

  4. willi kothgassner wrote on

    bitte um hilfe !!!
    with version 38.2.0 therwe does add om
    Bodytext Autoexport
    not work at all.
    pls give met advice.
    brgds willi

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Is this for Thunderbird? If so, you need to bring it up with the Thunderbird team, after contacting the developer about it.

  5. Alex wrote on

    Hi Jorge,
    it seems it takes quite a bit for the manual review process on extensions not listed on the store.
    What will happen if the review process of the queed addons will not be ready when FF41 will be released.

    Thanks,
    Alex