Add-ons Blog

Jetpack Project: weekly update for January 3rd, 2012

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, events, general, jetpack, sdk

Project News

Quick Stats

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2012-01-03 11:08:08 PST

Meeting Brief

  • Q4 re-cap: most goals are in good shape, need to blog about them, in particular mobile page-mod support.
  • Mossop is working with the Automation test to get automated performance tests running this quarter.
  • Changes in Firefox 10 have changed how arrays are treated when passed into content scripts, we need to adjust SDK code to account for this. This is now a blocking issue for 1.4
  • Flightdeck: looking towards scheduled 1.0 launch and 2012 roadmap, co-ordinating with Alex to fix issues in the current builder helper add-on.
  • Hidden window research is promising.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2012-1-3#Minutes

Add-ons Update – Week of 2011/12/28

by Jorge Villalobos

4

under compatibility, developers, documentation

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

The Review Queues

  • Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking less than 4 weeks to review.
  • Most updates are being reviewed within one week.
  • Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 2 weeks.

These stats are taken from last week’s queue report:

  • 74 new nominations that week. 153 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
  • 115 new updates that week. 120 updates in the queue awaiting review.
  • 97 new preliminary review submissions that week. 160 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Waiting times are rapidly dropping and will continue to drop in the following weeks thanks to our New Years Challenge. There’s still plenty of time to participate and win great prizes, including tablets and a laptop.

If you’re interested in joining the AMO Editors team and help us review add-ons, please visit our wiki page.

Firefox 10

The Firefox 10 compatibility post is here. The compatibility bump to Firefox 10 was run last week, so any add-ons with compatibility under 10.* should be tested and manually upgraded in the Developer Hub, if possible.

You can run the standalone compatibility tool if you want to test your add-on yourself or if it isn’t hosted on AMO.

The Add-ons Default to Compatible feature is progressing, and we expect to land on Firefox 10 or 11. Once this is in place, your compatibility worries will be minimized, and we’ll be taking a more active role in letting developers know if their add-ons are incompatible with a new version of Firefox. This feature will be a big win for both developers and Firefox users, so we’re very excited about it.

Firefox 11

A compatibility blog post for Firefox 11 is coming up.

AMO Editors New Year’s Challenge

by Amy Tsay

4

under contests, developers

The new year is upon us, and it’s time to make a big push on the review queues! Between December 22, 2011 and February 22, 2012, AMO Editors are eligible to win some great prizes.

Editors who review 100 or more add-ons during the contest period will advance to the final round, where a panel of judges will decide on the winners based on the following criteria:

  • Efficiency in reviews
  • Adherence to AMO review policies
  • Attention to security

Here’s what the winners will get:

First Place: 13” Macbook Air
Second – Fifth Places: Android tablet

All editors who complete 20 reviews or more during the contest period will receive Firefox t-shirts!

Not an editor? If you are an add-on developer who’s interested in making an impact and enjoying some great perks, join us!

The Fine Print:

  • No Mozilla employees or contractors are eligible. This is a volunteer-only contest.
  • Finalists will be determined based on reviews performed between December 22, 2011 (00:00 PST) to February 22, 2012 (00:00 PST).
  • Qualifying reviews include only approvals and rejections for any of the three queues (nominations, updates and preliminary), and does not include the standard temporary rejection for add-ons with binary components.
  • Reviews that need to be backed out due to editor mistakes do not count.

See complete contest rules »

Good luck!

Introducing the Fast Track review queue

by Jorge Villalobos

2

under developers, sdk

Since we overhauled our review process earlier this year, we have had three review queues: full review nominations, full review updates and preliminary reviews (nominations and updates in a single queue). With this we struck a difficult but important balance: ensuring that all add-ons listed on AMO have at least been checked for potential security problems, and at the same time giving developers the freedom to list their experimental, niche or unfinished add-ons as quickly as possible.

A team of hard-working volunteers spend their spare time reviewing all add-ons in these queues, and their efforts can be seen in the updates I post in this blog. Since not all add-on reviews are equal, we have some features in our review tools that allow reviewers to identify the items in the queues that can be done quickly. The Fast Track queue is the newest of these features.

Add-ons created with the Add-ons SDK are generally very easy to review, since for the most part they have little code and use predetermined and tested APIs provided by the SDK. The Fast Track queue now lists all SDK add-ons pending review that don’t break out of their sandbox (that is, that don’t use require(“chrome”)). Reviewers can now be more efficient, easily taking care of quick reviews that don’t require much attention.

We’re looking into adding other review classes into the Fast Track queue in the future. This is a valuable tool that enables us to better prioritize our work and reduce review waiting times for all add-on developers.

Statistics Correction in Developer Dashboards

by Amy Tsay

6

under developers

Recently, you may have noticed an issue with the new AMO stats dashboard. When designing the new pages, we wanted to reduce the noise level from mislabeled or malformed data. This was especially necessary for our “Usage by Application” data, which contains many applications we do not recognize.

To accomplish this, we filtered the raw data to only index versions of applications we were aware of. Unfortunately, the data source for these applications was incomplete, so when we indexed the data into the new system, we missed out on a large amount of legitimate data. Included in this data were the minor versions of Firefox, such as 4.0.1, 5.0.1 etc. As a result, a few developers noticed abrupt changes in their usage data.

We’ve relaxed the filter to be more permissive, and will be re-indexing statistics data for all add-ons to increase accuracy. Developers can expect to see a noticeable increase in their “Usage by Applicaton” statistics, where the sharp drop-offs shortly after each major version will now appear as a smoother curve. Total add-on usage numbers should remain unchanged as a result of this re-indexing.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns, and apologies for any inconvenience.

Jetpack Project: weekly update for Dec. 20th, 2011

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under builder, jetpack, mobile, sdk

Project News

  • Firefox developer Tim Taubert blogged about an interesting technique for getting Firefox’s native websocket implementation working on IRC Cloud using an SDK-based add-on.
  • Frustrated with debugging geolocation code? Try Louis-Remi Babe’s excellent Geo Devtool addon. This addon is SDK based and allows you to manually set the browser’s current geolocation.
  • Last but not least, have a happy and safe holidays!

Quick Stats

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate, please comment below. Stats generated at 2011-12-20 11:50:32 PST

Meeting Brief

  • Flightdeck: release tomorrow, key bindings should be back next week
  • SDK: reviewed remaining 2011 goals, l10n, mobile & indexDB support on track, addontab, unpacked xpis, html localization at risk
  • 2012 SDK roadmap being worked on here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Roadmap
  • Discussion of github access controls and best practices given accidental commits to stabilization this week
  • Myk will spin and release 1.4b3 later today
  • No meeting next week due to holidays, see you all in 2012!

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2011-12-20#Minutes

AMO network issues

by Justin Scott (fligtar)

2

under developers, end users

addons.mozilla.org and several other Mozilla services, including the Mozilla Labs Apps Developer Preview, are currently experiencing performance and availability issues. Mozilla IT is actively working to restore service, and you can view the current status here. Thanks for your patience.

Jetpack Project: weekly update for Dec. 13th, 2011

by Jeff Griffiths

0

under general

Project News

Quick Stats

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2011-12-13 10:32:47 PST

Meeting Brief

  • Builder: hotfix release on Monday to fix save issues, Wednesday’s regular release includes save fixes as well as new search tags for ‘example’ and ‘featured’, as well as super user support.
  • SDK: Q4 goals are on track!
  • Some discussion on automating performance testing of the SDK, including some advice from Dietrich on how is work in the cedar tree could be adapted to this.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2011-12-13#Minutes

Help Test Default Compatibility for Add-ons on Aurora

by Amy Tsay

11

under compatibility, developers, end users, releases

The latest phase of our add-on compatibility plan has arrived in Aurora, and we need your help to test it! Since Firefox 4, we have been automatically making add-ons hosted on AMO compatible with new Firefox releases. Now, we have extended automatic compatibility to non-hosted add-ons, which account for 75% of all add-ons in use (currently in the hundreds of millions). This means you should see less of the incompatible add-ons dialog, and more of your add-ons should just work.

You can read more about the plan, including how we determine eligibility for automatic compatibility here. For additional background reading, check out this blog post.

Once you have Aurora installed, all add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4 or later can be installed without extra steps. Firefox will install them even if they are declared incompatible in the manifest file.

If you don’t already have Aurora installed, you can get it here. With Aurora, you’ll see our newest features before they go beta, and have a chance to send us feedback before the final release.

Please send us feedback or file bugs on the new default to compatible feature here. We look forward to hearing from you!