Add-ons Update – Week of 2016/06/22

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

In the past 3 weeks, 1432 listed add-ons were reviewed:

  • 1354 (95%) were reviewed in fewer than 5 days.
  • 45 (3%) were reviewed between 5 and 10 days.
  • 33 (2%) were reviewed after more than 10 days.

There are 61 listed add-ons awaiting review.

You can read about the recent improvements in the review queues here.

If you’re an add-on developer and are looking for contribution opportunities, 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.

Compatibility Communications

Most of you should have received an email from us about the future compatibility of your add-ons. You can use the compatibility tool to enter your add-on ID and get some info on what we think is the best path forward for your add-on. This tool only works for listed add-ons.

To ensure long-term compatibility, we suggest you start looking into WebExtensions, or use the Add-ons SDK and try to stick to the high-level APIs. There are many XUL add-ons that require APIs that aren’t available in either of these options, which is why we ran a survey so we know which APIs we should look into adding to WebExtensions. You can read about the survey results here.

We’re holding regular office hours for Multiprocess Firefox compatibility, to help you work on your add-ons, so please drop in on Tuesdays and chat with us!

Firefox 48 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post for Firefox 48 is up, and the bulk validation will be run shortly.

As always, we recommend that you test your add-ons on Beta and Firefox Developer Edition 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

The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions. The current plan is to remove the signing override preference in Firefox 48.

3 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2016/06/22”

  1. noham wrote on

    Jorge,
    I found that a extension of mine was bitten by bug 612168 landed in Fx 47; it was marked with addon-compat but mention of it was added nowhere; other extensions using AddonListeners could be affected by it.

    I tried to mention it in the respective “Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 47” article but it seems that the comment section was already closed :/

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      How was your add-on affected by this change?

      1. noham wrote on

        I had an AddonListener implementing onEnabled and onDisabled to catch when the availability of a langpack changes.

        Now, these events aren’t broadcasted if the langpack is directly removed or enabled again undoing the removal; it’s necessary to listen these other events too, and then do some further checks to prevent listening to the same thing multiple times.