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
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.