Comments for Mozilla Add-ons Blog

Comment on Announcing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter by Brian

Brian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:15:01 +0000

It seems to work okay in Fx3.6b3 after a slight adjustment. I had the same problem with it not working, but I was able to fix it. Just follow these few steps:

0: Upgrade to Fx3.6b3
1: Open the about:config page
2: Find the preference “extensions.acr.firstrun”
3: Change the value from “false” to “true”
4: Restart Firefox

After restarting, ACR did whatever magic it does to override compatibility, and wanted a second restart. Do that, and everything should work after.

Comment on AMO welcomes self-hosted add-ons and HTML by Dave Dash

Dave Dash — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:20:38 +0000

Gomita,

I made a few changes to search which made search heavily reliant on Platform and versions – and it exposed some holes in our indexing strategy.

I’m working on a fix for this – and will try to put a push for this as soon as possible.

I’m also creating some more automated tests for search to keep this from happening.

-d

Comment on Add-on development just got easier by Sekizaru

Sekizaru — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:13:37 +0000

This is a bit late but I was just looking back over the statistics for my add-ons for the past few months and noticed a big drop off in downloads at the end of September. One add-on went from an average of 230 downloads/day down to 100/day, another from 30/day to 8/day. The drop starts on September 30th which led me to this post.

I also checked the total download stats and there is a drop in downloads from ~1.6m/day before this release to ~1.3m/day afterwards.

Do you have any insight into what would have caused this?
My guess is that it is related to search. The new statistics for download source would solve this but weren’t available at the time.

Other than that, congratulations on all the improvements made to AMO over the past few months. It’s really making a difference

Comment on Thanks for the compatibility reports! by Nils Maier

Nils Maier — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:07:17 +0000

We got:
469 reports of add-on working properly in Firefox 3.6 Beta (69%)
212 reports reports of add-on issues in Firefox 3.6 Beta (31%)

From what I saw after glancing over the reports many, if not most, of the “issue” reports can be attributed to the addon being disabled because of maxVersion.
Reports like:
“worked with 3.6b2 but deactivated in 3.6b3! Activate button grey and unclickable”, “Needs to be updated.”, “not yet updated”
Not helping at all and giving wrong results.

Unfortunately most of the other reports are simply useless to us, because they just say “issues” but give no details at all. Or users often restate they OS (”Windows Vista”) which is already clear from the other report information.

In conclusion I do think the compatibility reporter is a nice idea, but the quality of problem reports need to be improved dramatically to make it really useful.
I have not used the reporter myself yet, but the results give me the impression that the documentation and in-product help (wizards, descriptions and such) need to be improved. First of all users should not post problem reports if “maxVersion” is the issue.

Comment on Thanks for the compatibility reports! by Mime Cuvalo

Mime Cuvalo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:30 +0000

Just a heads up: my extension was one that got mixed reports. The extension does work with 3.6, I just haven’t updated the maxVersion number yet.

I suspect the users marking as broken are doing so b/c they see the add-on has become disabled (several reports said ‘does not appear anymore’ which means it was disabled).

The reporter should ignore the case where the extension is simply disabled.

Otherwise, good tool. Thanks!

Comment on AMO welcomes self-hosted add-ons and HTML by Gomita

Gomita — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:59:59 +0000

Nice feature.
However, I wonder why I cannot find my self-hosted addon named “FoxAge2ch” from the AMO’s search bar.
I can find it only if I set the advanced search options as Version=Any and Platform=Any.

Comment on Announcing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter by Holly

Holly — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:50:27 +0000

After upgrading to Fx3.6b3, my addons for previous versions were all disabled, including the ones I had already marked as working in Fx3.6b2. I had used the MRTech extension for some time (but disabled it now). Could it be that MRTech set some pref that keeps the Reporter from enabling addons? Can I do anything to get them working again, short of bumping them manually (which would break the Reporter functionality)?

Comment on Thanks for the compatibility reports! by Justin Scott (fligtar)

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:36:48 +0000

@Alfred – We added the extension version this weekend, so that will appear in future reports. For problem reports, we offer the user the option to enter comments, but we don’t require it as people would put useless comments.

@Wim – The report viewer displays 0.0 for reports submitted before we started requiring the version. We should display nothing instead of 0.0, which is a bug that will be fixed in our next release.

Add-ons can only be marked as “works properly” if they are shown as incompatible with your version of the application. For example, in Firefox 3.6, if the add-on is already compatible with Firefox 3.6, you can’t report that the add-on works properly because we assume that it does work properly since it was marked as compatible by the developer.

Comment on Thanks for the compatibility reports! by Neel Desai

Neel Desai — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:11:12 +0000

Nice…. Really nice….

Comment on Announcing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter by Ian M

Ian M — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:58:39 +0000

@glen @eckoman – same here