Add-ons Update – 2017/03

Jorge Villalobos

7 responses

Here’s the state of the add-ons world this month.

The Road to Firefox 57 explains what developers should look forward to in regards to add-on compatibility for the rest of the year. Please give it a read if you haven’t already.

The Review Queues

In the past month, 1,414 listed add-on submissions were reviewed:

  • 1132 (80%) were reviewed in fewer than 5 days.
  • 31 (2%) were reviewed between 5 and 10 days.
  • 251 (18%) were reviewed after more than 10 days.

There are 594 listed add-ons awaiting review.

We met last week to discuss the state of the queues and our plans to reduce waiting times. There are already some changes coming in the next month or so that should help significantly, but we have larger plans that we will share soon that should address this recurring problem permanently.

If you’re an add-on developer and are looking for contribution opportunities, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers are critical for our success, and can earn cool gear for their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Compatibility

The blog post for 53 is up and the bulk validation will be run soon. Firefox 54 is coming up.

Multiprocess Firefox is enabled for some users, and will be deployed for most users very soon. Make sure you’ve tested your add-on and either use WebExtensions or set the multiprocess compatible flag in your add-on manifest.

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.

Recognition

We would like to thank the following people for their recent contributions to the add-ons world:

  • Piotr Drąg
  • Niharika Khanna
  • saintsebastian
  • Atique Ahmed Ziad
  • gilbertginsberg
  • felixgirault
  • StandB
  • lavish205
  • numrut
  • fitojb
  • totaki
  • ingoe

You can read more about their work in our recognition page.

7 responses

  1. Dan wrote on :

    Fireefox Add On security

    Hello If Mozilla is so concerned with peoples privacy, why is there this note included on Add ON pages For the following? ———————————
    – Disconnect Self-Destructing Cookies WebRTC Better Privacy ZenMateVPN…..a VPN? These are only the ones I know about.
    So why should I use Firefox?

    Dan

    Permissions Some add-ons ask for permission to perform certain functions. Since you’re in control of your Firefox, the choice to grant or deny these requests is yours. Please note this add-on uses legacy technology, which gives it access to all browser functions and data without requesting your permission.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      Add-ons built with the new API (called WebExtensions) have clear permissions that are shown on install. Legacy add-ons don’t have this permissions feature, so we show that general statement for all of them.

  2. Max wrote on :

    We’ve been in the queue since January 9th. Is there anything being done to reduce the queue time for the more complicated submissions? As I understand it, reviewers are free to pick addons out of the queue at their own discretion, and naturally it seems addons like ours are getting passed over because of the effort it would take to review it. I don’t know the solution, but I figured I’d bring it up for discussion. How many addons were reviewed after more than 30 days? Thank you!

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on :

      Which add-on are you referring to?

    2. Ian Mckay wrote on :

      I feel your pain Max. I’ve got one (Wildfire) that’s been queued since Feb 12.

      I think some of the issues is that although there’s a moderate amount of reviewers in the team, they can only work on extensions that are not flagged for admin review. Your extension may get flagged for admin review automatically if you have obfuscated code or if a normal reviewer deems it necessary (there’s a review guide that determines escalation).

      There is a fairly small amount of admin reviewers (I’ve heard the number 2 thrown around!) so they have a hard time getting through these extensions. Perhaps there’s a need to get more people upgraded to admin status but I have no idea what the process or eligibility is for this.

      1. Max wrote on :

        Yep, our addon (Riff) is built with Webpack, and we had to upload source files. That’s our fault, but it did take the review team more than month to tell us this. I wonder if we’ll be flagged for each update? If so, 1-2 months just to get a couple line change in? Jeez.

  3. Michal wrote on :

    Hey guys,

    I mean, we really appreciate the work you are doing, but there is something seriously wrong with the current process!

    First time it took around two months, just to let us know that our manifest.json contains unsafe-eval script to google analytics. I mean, c’mon, two months for this? Seriously? If it is somewhere inside the guidelines, we are sorry, still two months of waiting for this?
    Now we are waiting since 14th of February and are still 130th in the queue, which did not change since the last 6 days.

    And the worst thing, we still do not know how long it will take or if it will ever happen, not speaking of that we improve the extension regularly, and before you check the updated version, we have already 1 or 2 releases out. And some functionality requires to have all the platforms up to date, and this is the most tricky part.
    And yes we know: that we should all become reviewers and help Mozilla, which is pretty hard to understand and to explain to investors, to be honest 🙁

    Our extension is in the Chrome and Safari Store working totally fine since more than two years and serving more than 50k users, and we are happy to comply with every rule you have, just let us know if we need to change something, and not like after a 15 minute check: “we found something”, and now wait for 2 months for another 15 minute check – “we found something”.

    Name of our add-on is SaferPass Password Manager.

    Thanks for any help,
    Michal
    CTO at SaferPass