The Review Queues

• Most nominations for full review are taking less than 5 days to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 3 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 days.

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

• 21 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 25 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 9 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our New Years Challenge has really paid off and add-ons are now reviewed almost immediately after they are submitted. Most add-ons waiting in the queue are waiting for actions from admin reviewers or their developers.

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

Test Your Add-ons for Memory Leaks!

The MemShrink team was assembled some time ago to work on reducing Firefox’s memory footprint. Many memory bugs have been filed and fixed for Firefox, but add-ons are also a significant factor in how much memory is being used.

There is an ongoing effort to track and stomp memory leaks in add-ons. Here’s where you can help, either by testing the add-ons you created, or testing the add-ons you use. Please read the article on Zombie Compartments, particularly the add-ons section. It should give you some pointers on how to find leaks and how to avoid them. The short version is don’t hold any references to DOM objects after the document is closed.

The AMO review team is already aware of this, and we have added memory leaks to our testing policies. Add-on versions that leaks may not get full review.

If you have any questions about this, post them in the comments.

Firefox 11

The Firefox 11 compatibility blog post is up now.

The compatibility bump will be run very soon, but it will be run differently than last time. Since Firefox 10 an above have add-on compatibility turned on by default, there’s no longer a need to do maxVersion bumping. So, we’re going to do run the usual compatibility checks, but only email developers if their add-ons don’t pass some of the checks. These add-ons that don’t will also be added to the compatibility override list so users know they are incompatible, provided that the compatibility bug really causes problems in the way the add-on works.

Firefox 12

Firefox 12 already hit the Aurora channel, so the compatibility updates should be coming soon.

The Review Queues

• Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 days to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 5 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 5 days.

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

• 39 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 50 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 49 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Our New Years Challenge has really paid off and add-ons are now reviewed almost immediately after they are submitted. Most add-ons waiting in the queue are waiting for actions from admin reviewers or their developers.

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. 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. I apologize for the delay.

More Details
The last few weeks, Mozilla IT has addressed numerous stability issues with AMO and VAMO (versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org, which handles add-on update pings) and made significant changes to the network configuration to keep AMO up and running. One of those changes was the addition of a caching proxy in our Amsterdam datacenter, which was brought online on December 16 to receive 1/3 of the update ping traffic.

Unfortunately, these new servers were not configured to send their logs to our metrics processing tools, so those pings were not counted and the logs are no longer available. We were not immediately sure of the scope of the problem due to both the ongoing stability issues and expected decline in usage during the holidays and fluctuation in usage after a release. The log configuration was corrected yesterday afternoon and Metrics is validating today whether the logs are being processed correctly going forward.

Mozilla IT and Metrics are working on automated ways to prevent this from happening in the future as we continue to deploy AMO around the world. We know that many developers depend on these statistics, and apologize for the data lost over the past 2.5 weeks.

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.

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.

AMO Outage

We had a significant outage on our site (and others) earlier this week, which affected some add-on operations such as compatibility checks. AMO is back to normal now and we’re looking into ways of avoiding this from happening again.

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking less than 5 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 10 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 67 new nominations that week. 224 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 101 new updates that week. 135 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 78 new preliminary review submissions that week. 115 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

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 for 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.

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 6 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 82 new nominations that week. 247 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 116 new updates that week. 149 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 66 new preliminary review submissions that week. 104 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re interested in joining the AMO Editors team and help us review add-ons, please read the page on How to Apply.

Firefox 8

There’s a bug that affects themes in Firefox 8, in Mac OS X Lion. Please read this blog post if you’re a theme developer.

Firefox 9

The Firefox 9 compatibility post is here. The compatibility bump to Firefox 9 was run weeks ago, so any add-ons with compatibility under 9.* 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.

We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. If you need more information about this, don’t hesitate to ask.

Firefox 10

Compatibility update coming soon!

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 5 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 10 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 4 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 67 new nominations that week. 243 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 111 new updates that week. 126 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 44 new preliminary review submissions that week. 267 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you compare these numbers to the last report, you’ll see we’re improving on most fronts. We continue to ramp up our efforts, and we’re in the process of introducing new editors from the Jetpack team, who should be able to help reviewing SDK-based add-ons.

If you’re interested in joining the AMO Editors team and help us review add-ons, please read the page on How to Apply.

Firefox 8

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here.

You should note that there are a couple of possible reversals coming into Firefox 8 that affect add-on developers, mostly in good ways:

• Bring back ISO8601DateUtils.jsm. Since the Date object isn’t exactly equivalent to this module and some significant add-on breakage was expected from its removal, it will be brought back for the time being. You should still change your add-ons so that it isn’t used anymore, but it’ll be at least one more release before it is completely removed.
• Back out bug 455694 (tab drag/detach animations). There is no final decision on this yet. The backout patch has been checked in for testing and you should track this bug if it affects your add-on.
• 3rd party add-on check doesn’t disable add-ons that were installed into the profile or application folder. The third party add-on check is being extended to include add-ons installed directly in the application folder or in the profile. This doesn’t affect any add-ons installed through the regular add-on installation process, or if they are installed manually from a local file. This should only affect add-ons that are automatically installed from an external package and copied into these other locations. It can affect add-on developers who have automatic installation processes to test their new code. You should read this comment for information on how to bypass this check and avoid the dialog at startup.

Firefox 9

The Firefox 9 compatibility post is here. The compatibility bump to Firefox 9 was run last week, so any add-ons with compatibility under 9.* 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.

We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 9 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. If you need more information about this, don’t hesitate to ask.

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 6 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 10 days.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 6 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 65 new nominations that week. 317 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 166 new updates that week. 168 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 133 new preliminary review submissions that week. 259 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

In order to reduce waiting times, we have hired a full time AMO Editor, who has been helping us for the past weeks. I expect the improvements to be noticeable on the next report. At this moment waiting times are very bad because there was a recent Firefox release and we’re getting many more updates than usual.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here.

We ran compatibility upgrades to Firefox 7 and Firefox 8, so that as many add-ons as possible have their compatibility set to 8.*. This will also enable all of these add-ons to participate in future compatibility bumps, since we normally only run them for those compatible with Aurora.

Firefox 9

I’ll post on this blog about Firefox 9 compatibility later this week. Most compatibility validation bugs have been filed, and we expect to run the next compatibility bump sometime next week, bringing the majority of our add-ons up to 9.* compatibility.

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

We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 9 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. If you need more information about this, don’t hesitate to ask.

The Review Queues

• Nominations for full review at the moment are being processed slower than usual. Most nominations are taking about 4 weeks to review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 2 weeks.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 3 weeks.

These stats are taken from the last queue report:

• 64 new nominations that week. 238 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• 228 new updates that week. 279 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• 89 new preliminary review submissions that week. 226 preliminary submissions in the queue awaiting review.

Firefox 5 and 6

If you still haven’t updated your add-on, here’s an overview of the breaking changes in Firefox 5 and 6. If you’re a theme developer, also check out this post.

Firefox 7 and 8

The breaking changes in Firefox 7 have been detailed in this post. The compatibility bump for Firefox 7 was run already, so if your add-on is not compatible yet, we recommend you test and see if any changes are required.

The Firefox 8 compatibility post is here. We strongly recommend that you aim to make your add-on compatible with the Firefox version in the Aurora channel, Firefox 8 at this moment. Making your add-on compatible with Aurora qualifies it for our automatic compatibility upgrades, saving you lots of time. Firefox 9 is coming to Aurora in a couple of weeks, so you should look into this soon.

Performance

If you need information on how to test how your add-on affects Firefox startup performance, please read this document: Measuring Add-on Startup Performance.