Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – 2017/05

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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. So please give it a read if you haven’t already.

The Review Queues

In the past month, our team reviewed 1,132 listed add-on submissions:

  • 944 in fewer than 5 days (83%).
  • 21 between 5 and 10 days (2%).
  • 167 after more than 10 days (15%).

969 listed add-ons are awaiting review.

For two weeks we’ve been automatically approving add-ons that meet certain criteria. It’s a small initial effort (~60 auto-approvals) which will be expanded in the future. We’re also starting an initiative this week to clear most of the review queues by the end of the quarter. The change should be noticeable in the next couple of weeks.

However, this doesn’t mean we won’t need volunteer reviewers in the future. If you’re an add-on developer and are looking for contribution opportunities, please consider joining us. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Compatibility

We published the blog post for 54 and ran the bulk validation script. Additionally, we’ll publish the add-on compatibility post for Firefox 55 later this week.

Make sure you’ve tested your add-ons and either use WebExtensions or set the multiprocess compatible flag in your manifest to ensure they continue working in Firefox. And as always, we recommend that you test your add-ons on Beta.

You may also want  to review the post about upcoming changes to the Developer Edition channel. Firefox 55 is the first version that will move directly from Nightly to Beta.

If you’re an add-ons user, you 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:

  • psionikangel
  • lavish205
  • Tushar Arora
  • raajitr
  • ccarruitero
  • Christophe Villeneuve
  • Aayush Sanghavi
  • Martin Giger
  • Joseph Frazier
  • erosman
  • zombie
  • Markus Stange
  • Raajit Raj
  • Swapnesh Kumar Sahoo

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

3 comments on “Add-ons Update – 2017/05”

  1. charles wrote on

    Where I can find more details about the automatic approval process?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      There are two main documents, which can be found here and here.

  2. Peter wrote on

    I will be blunt: I hate every UI decision Firefox has made since the dawn of 4.0. I’ve also hated every UI decision made by every other major browser. The reason why I have stuck with Firefox for more than 15 years is that with its powerful add-ons, I could fully customize my browsing experience and ignore every terrible UI decision being made in the meantime. Tabs on top? Tabs no longer on top. Horrible new search bar? Old search bar. Australis? Get that out of here, I’m on CTR.

    I’m not going to make ridiculous take-my-ball-and-go-home threats, because by and large, there’s not a lot of other places for me to take said ball. The problems the upcoming changes causes are also present in Chrome, Edge, and all other significant competitors. And as a coder myself, I’m not unsympathetic to the difficulty of maintaining this sort of functionality, or the problems that maintaining it introduces when you change other parts of the codebase.

    But despite all of that, the fact remains: in release 57, Mozilla will be killing the main reason why I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for so long, and killing the browser’s main unique selling point. There will no longer be any compelling reason, as an end user, to choose Firefox over any of its competitors. It’s extremely unfortunate that it’s come to this, and I wish you had chosen another way to do it (or at least implemented heavier UI customization in WebExtensions).