Justin Scott writes, “With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed [at the Mozilla Developer Center]. 3.1.b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.” For more information you should check out Justin’s blog post.

The team responsible for the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site recently conducted a survey of the add-on developer community. A total of 265 people responded to the survey, and the initial results have been published. “The general summary is that most respondents were individual developers with 2 or more years of add-on development experience. Naturally they felt comfortable with JavaScript and XUL. They primarily built add-ons for Firefox and hosted them on their own.” The full results have been published, but they are simply the raw results. The team will be applying some correlation analysis to draw out more interesting findings and conclusions. To view and discuss these initial results, see the post on Basil’s weblog.