4 ms·

I really think Firefox should have nailed down addon compatibility and silent updates before embarking of this FF4+ versioning adventure. It's good to see that

by NDizzle 15y ago

I really think Firefox should have nailed down addon compatibility and silent updates before embarking of this FF4+ versioning adventure. It's good to see that they are both on the roadmap, but I fear it's too little too late.

gcp 15y ago
I'm tempted to agree with the first sentence, but Firefox itself did start improving very rapidly the last year. It's very hard to say, even in retrospect, if the add-ons debacle was worth it or not. As for "too little too late": I presume you're talking about winning back people that went to Chrome because of the add-on and updates situation? This might be true, if those people are happy with Chrome, then Firefox will have to draw them back by executing better on other features.
samstokes 15y ago
As far as I understand it, they did largely nail down addon compatibility at least around the same time as the rapid releases began. Addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org have since last April [1] got automatic compatibility bumps each time a new version of Firefox is released. What they didn't realise was that only 25% of addons in active use were hosted on AMO, and the vast majority were self-hosted. The change referred to in this roadmap is to make the browser itself (rather than just AMO) treat extensions as compatible by default (and presumably quite a lot of supporting work to make sure that's a responsible way for the browser to behave). That change has also now landed [2]. These are important problems to tackle, but we should give credit where it's due, and it's rather more than just "on the roadmap". Justin Scott gives a good overview of their thought process and actions taken: [3] [1] http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/ http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili... [2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/ [3] http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/09/26/add-on-compatibility-progress-plans/#more-1246 http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/09/26/add-on-compatibility-prog...
keeperofdakeys 15y ago
They introduced the infrastructure (bootstrap and jetpack) around Firefox 4.x, so there have been addons that can update without restarts. The problem is people need to port addons to the new api.

by NDizzle 15y ago

gcp 15y ago

I'm tempted to agree with the first sentence, but Firefox itself did start improving very rapidly the last year. It's very hard to say, even in retrospect, if the add-ons debacle was worth it or not. As for "too little too late": I presume you're talking about winning back people that went to Chrome because of the add-on and updates situation? This might be true, if those people are happy with Chrome, then Firefox will have to draw them back by executing better on other features.

samstokes 15y ago

As far as I understand it, they did largely nail down addon compatibility at least around the same time as the rapid releases began. Addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org have since last April [1] got automatic compatibility bumps each time a new version of Firefox is released. What they didn't realise was that only 25% of addons in active use were hosted on AMO, and the vast majority were self-hosted. The change referred to in this roadmap is to make the browser itself (rather than just AMO) treat extensions as compatible by default (and presumably quite a lot of supporting work to make sure that's a responsible way for the browser to behave). That change has also now landed [2]. These are important problems to tackle, but we should give credit where it's due, and it's rather more than just "on the roadmap". Justin Scott gives a good overview of their thought process and actions taken: [3] [1] http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/ http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili... [2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/ [3] http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/09/26/add-on-compatibility-progress-plans/#more-1246 http://blog.fligtar.com/2011/09/26/add-on-compatibility-prog...

keeperofdakeys 15y ago

They introduced the infrastructure (bootstrap and jetpack) around Firefox 4.x, so there have been addons that can update without restarts. The problem is people need to port addons to the new api.