Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: compatibility developers documentation

Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/02/25

11 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 8 weeks to review.
  • 115 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
  • 57 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 6 weeks.
  • 85 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

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 37 Compatibility

The Firefox 37 compatibility blog post is up. The automatic AMO validation will be run in the coming weeks.

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.

Extension Signing

We recently announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox. If you’re an extension developer, please read the post and participate in the discussions. We will be posting a followup this week, expanding on the reasons behind this initiative.

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 each content tab in a different one. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

We will be talking more about these changes in this blog in the near future. For now we recommend you start looking at the available documentation.

11 comments on “Add-ons Update – Week of 2015/02/25”

  1. Akatsuki wrote on

    I’ve used the add-on Video Download Helper for many months, but yesterday it showed some message about 100 files downloads, need any donation?, I clicked cancel. Then, i can’t download any videos on any websites today. What’s happen and how can i fixed this problem? Doesn’t it a freeware?

    Ps. I ‘ve already reinstall Firefox and Video Download Helper, but there’s nothing better.

    Thank you very much!

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Please try contacting the developer. I don’t think they’ve added any restrictions to it, but it’s best that you confirm first.

  2. toady wrote on

    If the reviews are taking this long hows this addon signing going to work?

    I am curious as i have had 2 past addon updates take over a month with 1 taking just over 2 months are you planing to hire more staff to addess these long wait periods.

    Thank you in advance.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Signing reviews will be mostly automated, so they generally won’t have any delays. They will do malware detection and little else.

  3. Franco wrote on

    E ‘for so many years that I use’ ‘DownloadHelper’ ‘, but lately, you can not perform a download crisp, video files do not fit the download library, which is attached to firefox, is no longer able to make the switch in hardisk from this site (any site, you want to make the passage in the download library)!
    What should I do with the software in question, you have the drivers that may be useful to adjust the program?!?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Try contacting the add-on developer. That’s the best way to get help with an add-on, and there’s usually contact information in the add-on page.

  4. Robert Zenz wrote on

    Regarding extension signing, how exactly is the workflow to test an addon on the release build after that? Do we need to make a round trip to AMO to get it signed before we can test it (locally, on our machine)?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      To test on release versions you would use the unbranded release version that will be available for developers.

      1. Robert Zenz wrote on

        So there is some sort of guarantee that that developer version will behave exactly the same as the “normal” release version? If not we are allowed to report it as a bug and expect it to be fixed?

        1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

          The only differences between those builds will be the lack of branding and the preference that will let you install unsigned extensions. Any other difference would be a bug, yes.

          1. Robert Zenz wrote on

            Awesome, thanks for the info.

            You should describe exactly that in the next/upcoming post in detail, as I think many people are confused about exactly that and the workflow of developing addons “post extension signing”.