Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers documentation

Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/02/02

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Summary

  • These posts written every 2 weeks explain the current state of add-on reviews and other information relevant to add-on developers.
  • A few weeks ago, a new version of the Developer Tools was pushed live at AMO. It includes a new review process among a ton of other changes. More information here.
  • Nominations at the moment are being processed very slowly. 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. Updates and preliminary reviews are under control, but nominations have been delayed at least a couple of weeks.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 days.

The Review Queues

  • These stats are taken from the last queue report. Preliminary queue stats are still pending.
  • 97 new nominations that week. 534 nominations in the queue awaiting review (yeah, that’s not a typo).
  • 81 new updates that week. 109 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 2416 reviews were performed by AMO Editors in the month of January. That’s a new review record for us 🙂

Firefox 4 Compatibility

Firefox 4 will be released very soon, beta 10 is currently available for download and AMO already supports 4.0.* as a valid maxVersion. Most of the necessary documentation to upgrade your add-on for Firefox 4 is readily available:

Beta 7 was the first release after the codebase went through feature freeze. This means that no major changes are going to be performed, and add-ons that work correctly on current betas are likely to work in the same way until the final release. Here are some pending issues of Firefox 4 compatibility that haven’t been addressed in other blog posts:

  • Since toolbar buttons are very important for developers and button sizes changed for Firefox 4, I wrote this analysis of toolbar buttons and icons in Firefox 4. One problem was brought up in the comments, which triggered the creation of bug 616472. The bug and its dependencies are progressing, and hopefully all the fixes will be included on the next beta. Once they make it to a beta or release candidate, I’ll post an update to the toolbar button article.
  • I posted an explanation about the threading and worker changes in Firefox 4. If your add-on used the Thread Manager and doesn’t work in Firefox 4, that article is meant for you.
  • The Add-on Bar is supposed to appear automatically when a button or other items are added to it. Bug 616419 was filed for this. It doesn’t look like it will be fixed soon, but an alternate solution is proposed in the comments.

Notes for Developers

  • Add-on Performance at XUL School. This article is highly recommended to all developers. It explains a few methods to improve add-on performance, including how to easily measure startup times.
  • The AMO Editor Guide. This new page in the wiki is a comprehensive guide to the work performed by AMO Editors. It will serve as an introductory guide for new editors, and is a step forward in being as transparent as possible with our review process. It’s currently being edited to adjust it to the upcoming review system.
  • Useful Information for Add-on Authors. How to improve review times for your add-on, information about the review process, etc.

Jorge Villalobos

Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

One comment on “Add-ons Review Update – Week of 2011/02/02”

  1. Alfred Kayser wrote on

    And for Themers:
    All the theme updates for Firefox 4.0 are traced in:
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1418995&sid=e135af5790ce47e68aaa9245d4e7cc08

    And of course, my themes are updated for FF4.0 up to the very latest changes (Feb 1st, 2011).