Mozilla Add-ons Blog

Test!

Jorge Villalobos — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:40:37 +0000

This is a guest post from Mark Banner.

With the Thunderbird 5 Beta release, we’ve enabled the 5.* maximum version in the AMO Developer tools. Thunderbird 5 Beta is now API frozen, so if you haven’t already done so, please make sure your add-on is compatible. We expect it to be released near the end of the month.

For add-ons, the most significant change in Thunderbird 5 is the new Add-on Manager that was incorporated into Firefox 4. There is documentation and further information on developer.mozilla.org.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please post in the forums, or join #extdev on irc.mozilla.org for real-time assistance.

Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/06/08

Jorge Villalobos — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:25:01 +0000

I post these updates every 2 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues and any other important stuff going on in the add-ons world.

Summary

Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. The new review system required hundreds of add-on developers to renominate their add-ons, which has placed a large workload on the editor team. Nominations are currently taking several weeks (~5) to review.
Most updates are being reviewed within a week.
Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team and helped us cut down review times. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

These stats are taken from the last queue report.
100 new nominations that week. 378 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
83 new updates that week. 85 updates in the queue awaiting review.
102 new preliminary review submissions that week. 223 in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 5 and 6

I just posted a thorough look at breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If there’s anything missing there, please let us know.

Performance

On the add-on performance front, the Talos team has been doing a lot of progress fixing bugs in the automated testing framework. Our Performance page is now much more accurate because of this. For a more detailed view of the test results, Wladimir Palant (the creator of AdBlock Plus) has an excellent overview dashboard that points out failed tests as well as abnormal results.

One of the bugs filed for the this initiative requested documentation for add-on developers on how to set up a similar testing system as the one we are currently using. I’ve completed this document and you can find it here: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance. I encourage you to give it a try and let me know if there’s anything missing or incorrect in the document.

Making your add-ons compatible with Firefox 5 and 6

Jorge Villalobos — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:14:01 +0000

Update: moved bullet point about Bug 656331 from Firefox 6 section to Firefox 5. Thanks, Nils!

The new rapid release schedule for Firefox is in effect, and you can already get preview versions of Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 in the Beta and Aurora channels, respectively. Firefox 5 will most likely be released in a couple of weeks, and Firefox 6 should follow 6 weeks later.

Because of the fast-paced schedule, these new releases are less problematic for add-on developers given that they include very few compatibility-breaking changes. This post covers all known add-on compatibility issues with Firefox 5 and 6. If you have run into other issues and don’t see them mentioned here or documented anywhere else, please let us know.

We have already done an automatic compatibility upgrade to Firefox 5 for all add-ons that qualified for it, and we will do a similar upgrade for 6 sometime this week, maybe later today.

How do we select which add-ons to upgrade? They need to be compatible with the previous Firefox version, they must not have binary components (since they usually need to be rebuilt) and they need to pass special compatibility tests that we create based on the known breaking changes, which are listed below.

Firefox 5

The value of navigator.language no longer reflects the language of the Firefox UI (Bug 55366). To obtain the UI language you can use the general.useragent.locale preference instead.
The default behavior of setTimeout and setInterval when no wait time is set has changed (Bug 610077). If you set the timer to a very low value the actual wait time would be rounded to 10ms before. Now, that minimum has changed, and it depends on where the code is running.
A number of words are now reserved in JavaScript, even when not in strict mode (Bug 637204). The newly reserved words are class, enum, export, extends, import and super. You shouldn’t use these words anywhere in your code, even as object property names. Some add-ons that are affected by this might have been automatically upgraded to Firefox 5 compatibility, so please check your code and look for any errors during execution in Firefox 5.
Instantiating nsICertOverrideService (and perhaps others) at startup can make Firefox unusable (Bug 650858). We caught this one recently, and we’re still gauging its impact. The bug is only manifested if you try to instantiate a service before the load event. This is easy to avoid:

WRONG

var comp = Components.classes[...].getService(...);
+var MyObject = {
+  init: function() {},
+  ...
+}
+window.addEventListener("load", function() { MyObject.init(); }, false);

WRONG

var MyObject = {
+  comp : Components.classes[...].getService(...),
+  init: function() {},
+  ...
+}
+window.addEventListener("load", function() { MyObject.init(); }, false);

RIGHT

var MyObject = {
+  comp : null,
+  init: function() {
+    this.comp = Components.classes[...].getService(...);
+  },
+  ...
+}
+window.addEventListener("load", function() { MyObject.init(); }, false);

Just don’t instantiate any components before the load event. Better yet, follow our performance best practices and don’t instantiate anything until it’s needed.

Mac OS SDK builds for the beta are missing (Bug 653971). This affects you if you build binary components for Mac OS. There are several bugs involved in this, but they are being tracked in this bug. It should be fixed within a few days.
XPCOM binary component registration no longer ignores Module::kVersion (Bug 656331).
More documented changes in Firefox 5 for developers.

Firefox 6

The app.update.timer preference was replaced by the app.update.timerMinimumDelay preference (Bug 614181).
A few interfaces (rarely) used in add-ons have been removed: IWeaveCrypto (Bug 651596), nsIDOMDocumentTraversal (Bug 655514) and nsIDOMDocumentRange (Bug 655513).
window.top is now read-only (Bug 654137). This affects your add-on if you use an undeclared variable called top in a chrome script.
javascript: and data: URLs entered into the location bar no longer inherit the principal of the currently-loaded page (Bug 656433). Maybe this won’t affect any add-ons, but there are many workarounds and odd pieces of code in the wild, so it’s better that you double check if you run any code using these types of URL.
New Web Developer Sub-menu in the Tools menu (Bug 653221). Because of all the new developer tools being included in Firefox, it was determined that it was best to group them in a sub-menu. This means that many overlays – those that rely on these menuitems being direct children of the Tools menu – will be affected. Your overlays will continue to work, but your items will most likely end up at the bottom of the menu instead of where you want them.
Reordering of the History menu (Bug 625322) and the Bookmarks menu (Bug 625325). This may affect your add-on if you overlay or work on those menus.
The clearUserPref method no longer throws if the pref doesn’t have a user value (Bug 487059).
Implement Site-Specific Privacy Preferences (Bug 573176). This should only affect add-ons that rely on certain preferences (privacy, remember passwords, and others) being in the main preferences window.
More documented changed in Firefox 6 for developers.

Once again, if there’s anything missing in these lists, please let us know. Thank you!

Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/05/24

Jorge Villalobos — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:56:52 +0000

I post these updates every 2 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues and any other important stuff going on in the add-ons world.

Summary

Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. The new review system required hundreds of add-on developers to renominate their add-ons, which has placed a large workload on the editor team. Nominations are currently taking several weeks (~7) to review.
Most updates are being reviewed within a week.
Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team and helped us cut down review times. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

These stats are taken from the last queue report.
88 new nominations that week. 454 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
88 new updates that week. 102 updates in the queue awaiting review.
121 new preliminary review submissions that week. 157 in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 5

Firefox 5 is already on beta. The development cycle for future versions of Firefox will be very fast, moving changes between 4 different update channels, as explained here. There will be a new major Firefox release roughly every 6 weeks.

We have already upgraded most Firefox 4-compatible add-ons on our site to support Firefox 5, automatically. We scanned all changes checked in, identified the ones that could affect existing add-ons, and integrated them into our automatic upgrade script. You should have received an email indicating if your add-on was upgraded, with indications of why not if that was the case.

For more info, check out Firefox 5 for developers.

Firefox 6

The code that will become Firefox 6 is also on track to be moved to the Aurora channel. Actually, according to plan this should happen today.

We will perform the automatic Firefox 6 upgrade very soon, so again we’re looking at breaking changes. I will be blogging about this soon because there are a few possibly-breaking changes coming up in 6.

You can start digging into the docs in Firefox 6 for developers.

Performance

Firefox 5 Compatibility Bump

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Sat, 21 May 2011 10:21:56 +0000

Earlier tonight we updated compatibility information for add-ons that work with Firefox 4 to also work with Firefox 5, except in certain cases where we think the add-on may be incompatible. This coincided with the beta release of Firefox 5, though normally it would occur when the Nightly channel is promoted to Aurora, as described in the Rapid Releases Compatibility Plan.

We were able to mark 3,890 add-ons as compatible with Firefox 5. There were 256 that failed our automatic scanners either due to including binary components or using navigator.language, which was changed in Firefox 5. All affected add-on authors received an email about the compatibility update and instructions depending on whether they passed or failed.

This was our first time doing a mass compatibility bump, so please let us know your feedback on it, especially if you think something didn’t work properly.

One noteworthy issue is that some developers will receive emails saying that a previous version of their add-on has had its compatibility bumped if the latest version is already compatible. We only intended to bump the latest reviewed version of a Firefox 4 compatible add-on, along with any newer versions that haven’t been reviewed yet. This unnecessary change should be corrected for future updates.

Developers will see this process take place again in the next two weeks for the imminent Aurora 6 promotion, and then things will be on their normal track every 6 weeks.

Subscribe to Add-on Compatibility Announcements

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Fri, 20 May 2011 22:33:34 +0000

With Firefox releases happening more quickly, add-on developers will have less time to address compatibility issues that might surface. We’ve implemented a new compatibility process to ease that burden for the majority of add-ons.

We’ve also created a new mailing list for add-on compatibility announcements that we encourage all add-on developers to subscribe to. This is a moderated list that we’ll occasionally email with information on breaking compatibility changes and upcoming Firefox release summaries. We especially encourage developers who do not host their add-ons on AMO to subscribe, as this will be the best way to keep up with compatibility in absence of the automatic detection and bumps of other add-ons.

Subscribe to the list here

Want to help select featured add-ons? Apply now!

dhorner — Sun, 15 May 2011 12:00:17 +0000

Mozilla needs your help

Since the beginning of AMO, we’ve had a set of featured add-ons that are displayed prominently on the homepage and an ever-expanding list of other areas. Being featured guarantees downloads and notoriety, and many add-ons, especially start-ups, see it as crucial in order for their add-on to succeed.

End users see this list as a safe place to start with add-ons and trust Mozilla to feature great add-ons that work perfectly. However the selection process until now has been a pretty objective one, handled randomly by a small number of people, and the list has not been updated as frequently as we would have hoped.

We would therefore like to reach out to the Mozilla community to be part of an Advisory board to review new add-ons, and maintain a set of featured add-ons that are updated each month. We think this is a fair, and novel way to overcome some of the hurdles involved outlined above, and a chance to hand the responsibility over to the community that actually use and develop add-ons on a daily basis.

The Featured add-ons advisory board

Every 6 months, a call will go out via the Add-ons Blog for volunteers to participate in choosing featured add-ons. Volunteers must commit to trying the add-ons that apply to be featured and attending a monthly conference call to discuss suitability.

Each Board’s term is 6 months and will be comprised of 5 community members and 2-3 members of the Mozilla Add-ons team.

A note on member requirements:

Members must abstain from voting on add-ons that they have any business or personal affiliations with, as well as direct competitors of any such add-ons. Members must be picked from the add-ons community: power users, developers, and evangelists of add-ons

If you would like to be considered for a position on the add-ons advisory board, please email amo-featured@mozilla.org with your name and contact details, no later than May 19th 23:59 PDT.

You can find our more about the new featured add-on selection process on the wiki.

Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/05/12

Jorge Villalobos — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:05:14 +0000

I post these updates every 2 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues and any other important stuff going on in the add-ons world.

Summary

Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. The new review system required hundreds of add-on developers to renominate their add-ons, which has placed a large workload on the editor team. Nominations are currently taking several weeks (~8) to review.
Most updates are being reviewed within a week. An avalanche of updates were submitted following the final Firefox 4 release, so we have been spending extra time keeping updates in line.
Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 4 weeks.
We posted a call for new reviewers on our blog recently and many new reviewers have already joined our team. If you’re interested, please read on how to apply.

The Review Queues

These stats are taken from the last queue report.
58 new nominations that week. 439 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
123 new updates that week. 118 updates in the queue awaiting review.
102 new preliminary review submissions that week. 351 in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 4

Firefox 4 is out! If your add-on is already compatible, you should update your maxVersion to 4.0.* to cover all future 4.0 releases. Most of the necessary documentation to upgrade your add-on for Firefox 4 is readily available:

Firefox 4 for developers at MDC.
Making your add-on compatible with Firefox 4.
Toolbar buttons and icons for Firefox 4.
Firefox 4 Compatibility discussion in the Add-ons Forum. This is the best place to post any feedback and bugs related to Firefox 4 and add-on development.

Firefox 5

Yeah, it’s time to begin thinking about Firefox 5. The development cycle for future versions of Firefox will be very fast, moving changes between 4 different update channels, as explained here. There will be a new major Firefox release roughly every 6 weeks.

On our side, we will automatically upgrade the compatibility of your add-on to Firefox 5 unless we have reasons to believe the add-on is incompatible. Since major releases are produced faster, it also means they’re milder in terms of breaking changes. The discussion about this new add-on compatibility process is happening in this newsgroup. If you want to get more details or have any feedback, please dive in.

The Firefox repo has already branched into the Aurora track, meaning that no major changes will happen until final release. Here are the documents you should follow to know what’s going on:

Firefox 5 for developers. As far as I can see, there is only one change that is worth noticing: navigator.language no longer corresponds to the UI language, but to the value of the Accept-Language header. If you want to get the locale of the browser UI, you should use the general.useragent.locale preference instead.
Features wiki. This link is useful for long-term planning. It’s a feature development plan for the Firefox team (and others), and it includes several prioritized lists of what is being planned for future versions of Firefox. It’s a new approach to planning, so it’s bound to change rapidly.

Notes for Developers

Our add-on performance initiative was launched recently, beginning with a page that lists add-ons that have been identified as slow by our Talos testing system and backed up by real world usage data and manual tests. Some developers have responded negatively to the release, pointing out a number of bugs in the testing system as well as problems in the wording of the slow add-ons page. We take these bugs seriously and thank these developers for filing bugs and being responsive. Many of them have been fixed already. We have also scaled down the slow add-ons list until we correct the issues that we consider critical to move forward.
The AMO Editor Guide. This is a comprehensive guide to the work performed by AMO Editors. If you want to have a clear idea of how we test add-ons, or you’re interested in joining us, this is a good place to begin.
Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.

Add-on Performance Testing Update

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Tue, 10 May 2011 21:11:24 +0000

Alice Nodelman has posted an update on our efforts to improve automated testing of add-on performance. We encourage add-on developers interested in our progress towards resolving these bugs and in our future plans to read the update and provide feedback.

Announcing Add-on SDK 1.0b5

Dave Mason — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:50:36 +0000

The Jetpack team is happy to announce the release of Add-on SDK, version 1.0b5. This version is the last beta version before the 1.0 release of Mozilla’s downloadable software development kit for building Firefox add-ons. This version includes new APIs, some enhancements, and a great deal of bug fixes and stability improvements. Notable are:

New Hotkeys API to let you easily create new keyboard shortcuts.
New APIs for communicating with Content Scripts
New Window-specific widget to change the widget content on a per-window basis

To get started building add-ons with the Add-on SDK, download it and then check out the
+documentation and the Release Notes for more details about this release.

As always we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release! You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
+chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
+report a bug
+check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation