Mozilla Add-ons Blog

RJ Walsh has just completed the first revision of the add-on verification suite we proposed a few months ago, now live on addons.mozilla.org. This suite gives add-on authors and editors an automated tool to examine add-ons for common problems, and recommends fixes where appropriate.

The goals for the project are:

• Detect problems in add-ons, including issues with security, compatibility, and other areas. The author can receive alerts if problems are found.
• Help editors by automating simple, repetitive tests so they can spend their time doing more interesting things
• Maintain the level of excellence in public add-ons that Firefox users expect

Accessing the verification suite

If you are an add-on author log in to your developer control panel and choose “Versions and Files” for one of your add-ons. Find the version you want to analyze and click “No Test Results.” This takes you to the testing screen. We’ll make this process easier in a future update.

What you’ll see

After a brief analysis, a summary is displayed at the top of the page with what tests were run and their results. If you see all green check marks, congratulations! Your add-on has passed the verification suite’s current set of tests.

If you see any warnings or errors scroll down the page to see a detailed report. Beside each message that is reported is a [help] link which points to a page of documentation explaining each test in more detail.

Things to remember

Keep in mind that many tests are written to catch a broad number of cases and may display false positives. Seeing warnings in the add-on analysis does not necessarily mean your add-on has problems – it’s simply raising a flag to double check that area. As usual, we are very open about exactly what we are testing here. This tool, just like AMO, is completely open source and can be browsed online.

Future plans

Over the next few months we’ll refine the tool to prevent false positives and add additional tests. If you can think of other tests that would be helpful for authors or editors please submit a patch or just let us know. We expect to have the tests running automatically when an add-on is uploaded by the end of the year.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for improvements please let us know, either as a comment on this blog or on IRC.

As we mentioned earlier this year, we’ve been thinking about adding tagging to make add-ons easier to classify and discovery.  Starting last week, any add-on in AMO can get tagged by users and developers alike.  For those of you unfamiliar with tagging, it’s simply a way to add words or phrases that describe an add-on to help users find and understand the purpose of an add-on.   So if you’re the kind of person who loves organization, go ahead and tag all the add-ons you love with words that you find useful.

Tags appear on the right side of all add-on listing pages, and there’s a simple UI for creating tags.  We allow spaces and most symbols, and tags will also show up in our updated search results page.  You’ll be able to see all add-ons with a certain tag simply by clicking on it, and tags are a great way to set keywords so your add-ons appear in searches for certain words or phrases.

Of course, individual developers have the final say on which tags go on their add-ons and they can delete any tags created by the community.  We’ll continue to develop this feature based on user feedback and we hope to find new and interesting ways of using this tag data to help users and developers.  Let us know what you think!

For those of you looking to nominate your add-on for public status, you no longer need to have reviews from users to submit the nomination. We made this change to help our developers as it was hard to get public reviews while still in experimental status. All other requirements for nomination stay the same, to learn more read our Reviewers’ Guide.

In the days after Firefox 3’s release last year, I made a blog post titled “A note on add-on stats this week” that explained why active daily user statistics would be inflated more than usual.

With the release of Firefox 3.5 today, the same inflation will be present for the rest of this week, so please don’t be alarmed by a large spike in the reported active installations of your add-ons.

Hopefully by the release of Firefox.next, we will have fixed the bug that will allow us to get rid of update ping inflation entirely.

If you’re any sort of web developer (even a mediocre one like myself) and you’re reading this blog then Firebug is likely to be an important part of your Firefox experience. Thanks to the hard work of many contributors, Firebug 1.4.0b1 is now on AMO for people who are running or looking to run Firefox 3.5.

More from Rob Campbell, our resident Pyroentomologist, here:

Firebug 1.4.0b1 Limited Release on AMO

Firefox 3.5 is awesome- lots of performance improvements and new features.

Learn more about Firefox 3.5 and download it here!

A friend pointed out today’s gem on ICHC:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I got a nice LOL from this and now my curiosity is piqued: any other (obscure or otherwise) pop-culture references to add-ons out there?

Nick

Here’s a friendly reminder on our add-ons meetup happening tonight at the Mozilla Office.

Location:

1981 Landings Dr, Building K (see map)

Mountain View, CA 94043

Time:

Pizza will arrive around 6:30

Presentations start at 7PM sharp

Agenda:

List of presentations

Streaming:

On air.mozilla.com live (Fx 3.5 requried) and will be archived for later viewing

IRC:

#amo on irc.mozilla.org

See you there!