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Categories: developers end users restartless webextensions

“Restart Required” Badge on AMO

10 responses

When add-ons were first introduced as a way to personalize Firefox, they required a restart of Firefox upon installation. Then came “restartless” extensions, which made the experience of installing an add-on much smoother. Every iteration of extensions APIs since then has similarly supported restartless add-ons, up to WebExtensions.

To indicate that an add-on was restartless, we added “No Restart” badges next to them on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This helped people see which add-ons would be smoother to install, and encouraged developers to implement them for their own add-ons. However, two things happened recently that prompted us to reverse this badge. Now, rather than using a “No Restart” badge to indicate that an add-on is restartless, we will use a “Restart Required” badge to indicate that an add-on requires a restart.

One reason for this change is because we reached a tipping point: now that restartless add-ons are more common, and the number of WebExtensions add-ons is increasing, there are now more extensions that do not require a restart than those that do.

Another reason is that we encountered an unexpected issue with the recent introduction of multiprocess Firefox. In Firefox 48, multiprocess capability was only enabled for people with no add-ons installed. If you are one of these people and you now install an add-on, you’ll be asked to restart Firefox even if the add-on is restartless. This forced restart will only occur over the next few versions as multiprocess Firefox is gradually rolled out. This is not because of the add-on, but because Firefox needs to turn multiprocess off in order to satisfy the temporary rule that only people without add-ons installed have multiprocess Firefox enabled. So a “No Restart” badge may be confusing to people.

Restartless add-ons becoming the norm is a great milestone and a huge improvement in the add-on experience, and one we couldn’t have reached without all our add-on developers—thank you!

10 comments on ““Restart Required” Badge on AMO”

  1. alf wrote on

    Just curious: The restart for e10s users installing their first add-on is required even if the add-on is marked as e10s-compat too? What is the bug number of the mentioned issue?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Yes, it’s required for all add-ons for this first release. Later, it won’t be required for a small group of add-ons, and then for all e10s-compatible add-ons. It’s part of a gradual rollout of the feature to monitor stability and avoid breaking the experience for many users. I don’t know of a bug tracking this plan.

      1. alf wrote on

        I was talking about the specific bug given as second reason to push this new badge

  2. Aryx wrote on

    Will it be obvious to the user that a restart of the browser and not of the computer is required?

  3. Natalie Grossman wrote on

    You linked here [1] to documentation of the signing API, but apparently never wrote that documentation (“SORRY This page does not exist yet”) [2]. Can you fix the link, or else write the documentation?

    (No, it’s not related to this post, but comments are blocked on that page. Thank you; so convenient.)

    [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/11/20/signing-api-now-available/
    [2] https://olympia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/api/signing.html

    1. Andy McKay wrote on

      The docs are now at https://addons-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/api/signing.html will update the blog post.

  4. Wink wrote on

    Why did you mark as “Restart Required” all search engines add-ons? They don’t need reastart at all.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/search/?atype=4

    1. Andy McKay wrote on

      That was a mistake, github issue added.

      1. Chan wrote on

        Language packs are wrongly tagged as requiring-restart too.

  5. chavezramirez wrote on

    hola amigos de firefox