Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/09/02

5 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.
  • 110 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 6 weeks.
  • 69 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 weeks.
  • 149 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

The unlisted queues aren’t mentioned here, but they are empty for the most part (there are actually a couple hundred add-ons awaiting review there but they are awaiting a bulk-review tool that is being worked on, since they belong to a couple of large sets of almost identical add-ons). We’re in the process of getting more help to reduce queue length and waiting times for all 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 41 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post has been up for a while. The compatibility bump should be run soon.

Firefox 42 Compatibility

Expect the blog post to come up sometime next week.

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.

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 now gone, and just redirects to the new one.

Extension Signing

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.

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.

If you read Kev’s post on the future of add-on development, you should know there are big changes coming. We’re investing heavily on the new WebExtensions API, so we strongly recommend that you start looking into it for your add-ons. If you have requests for new APIs, please suggest them in the uservoice forum.

5 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/09/02”

  1. Charles wrote on

    Will be some (temporally) UI piece for the main window in the release build of Fx 41, to inform about the disabling of extensions after an update from Fx 40? Besides all that warnings in the Add-ons Manager. I’m thinking in something similar to the doorhangers reporting the enabling of e10s the first time that it’s enabled in nightly/aurora builds.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      There should be a message about the unsigned add-ons that are disabled when you start Firefox the first time.

      1. Yuck wrote on

        Since “Warn me if this will disable any of my add-ons” is the default, the warning should appear before updating.

  2. Patrick Cloke wrote on

    > * Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.
    > * Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 weeks.

    This seems pretty surprising: It implies that by the time an add-on goes through review it (potentially) already needs to be updated!

    It would seem that this workload will just explode as many add-ons will need to be rewritten to work with e10s, they’ll essentially need full reviews again. Are there plans to mitigate this expected bump in reviews? Or is the hope that people will give up making Firefox add-ons such that the queue shrinks? 😉

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      That number is a little misleading, since it’s based on the state of the queues rather than the time that it takes add-ons to be reviewed. Actually, most submissions are being reviewed within a couple of days, but the more difficult ones (which are often flagged for admin review) bubble up to the top and stay there for a while. We are hiring a couple of reviewers to help us with those add-ons in particular, but they haven’t started yet. I’m actually publishing a more detailed post this week to explain what has happened with the review queues recently.