Since launching the Add-on Compatibility Reporter in October, we’ve received over 70,000 user reports on add-ons. That’s an incredible response, and it’s helping both Mozilla and developers identify add-ons that are working fine despite their compatibility information, and others that might actually have compatibility problems.
Some of the feedback we’ve received from add-on developers is that the reports are sometimes miscategorized or unhelpful. Unhelpful reports usually occur when a user doesn’t understand what they should be reporting. In miscategorized reports, the user might say the add-on has a problem, but in the comments types “works fine”.
One idea I’ve been exploring to improve the quality of the reports and make enabling incompatible add-ons safer is turning the reporter into a wizard. Instead of just enabling all incompatible add-ons at once and hoping the user goes to the Add-ons Manager to report on them, the wizard would enable each add-on one at a time and walk the user through submitting a report. After the user tests and submits the report, the browser would be restarted with the next add-on enabled for testing. A toolbar could be used to keep track of what add-on is currently being tested and to navigate the process:
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Just a quick update to yesterday’s post about Add-on Compatibility Tracking: the first part of the compatibility tracker is now live on AMO, so give it a try if you’d like to see detailed compatibility information per add-on. It’s updated hourly, and we’re up to 21% compatibility, +1% in the last day.
The rest of the tool should be ready next week.
I recently posted about the start of the campaign to get add-ons ready for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, and wanted to explain what our goals are and how we’ll be tracking progress.
As with previous Firefox releases, we’re aiming to have 90% of add-ons that make up the top 95% of add-on usage compatible with Firefox 3.1. That’s not an easy goal to comprehend, so I’ll explain what it means and why we do it.
Every day, the Mozilla Add-ons website gets around 135 million update checks from add-ons installed in Firefox and Thunderbird applications all over the world to determine if any updates are available. While there are some extensions that account for several million of those pings alone, there are many extensions that are not as popular and may have less than 100 active daily users. To make sure our outreach efforts benefit the most end users, we rank the add-ons by their number of active daily users and focus on helping the add-ons that make up 95% of the total add-on usage.
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With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 today comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates!
If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed here. 3.1b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.
And as another reminder, if you only need to bump the maxVersion number for compatibility with 3.1b1, you do not need to submit your add-on for review. Simply use the Developer Tools area to bump the maxVersion and Firefox will check AMO for this when determining which add-ons are incompatible.
If you’re an extension user and one or more of your add-ons isn’t working in Firefox 3.1b1 yet, please be patient. Many add-ons are developed by volunteers in their spare time who may not be able to address compatibility immediately if their extension requires significant changes, which it should hopefully not. As in previous releases, Mozilla will be reaching out to developers in an effort to get as many extensions as possible updated before 3.1 is released.