Comments on: Solving Firefox’s add-on compatibility problem

By: The Add-ons Manager and I are rather good chums « Blair’s Brain

The Add-ons Manager and I are rather good chums « Blair’s Brain — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:24:30 +0000

[...] a third of all the unit tests for the Add-ons Manager. Okay, maybe that part wasn't so fun… but solving the add-on compatibility problem [...]

By: arthurz1

arthurz1 — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:58:56 +0000

good news firefox aurora makes addons compatible by default

By: Firefox Add-On Compatibility | eschew it all

Firefox Add-On Compatibility | eschew it all — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:27:44 +0000

[...] looks like Firefox is moving to a compatible-by-default model for extensions. I find this interesting, since I proposed this back in 2004 to no [...]

By: Oxymoronical » Blog Archive » The add-ons manager is about to get more Unfocused

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:09:28 +0000

[...] all the UI parts of the redesign from scratch. Most recently he knocked it out of the park with the default to compatible feature that is in beta builds now. That was a large hairy project involving multiple teams that [...]

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:05:58 +0000

Themes always use strict compatibility (ie, the old method, where they need to declare exactly what they’re compatible with), for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

There has been a bit of a debate over this – I asked someone who thought themes should be compatible by default to post a thread to the dev-apps-firefox mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/HDFiu3mJ3Ws

General consensus there was that themes should not be compatible by default, which matched my original assessment.

By: patickjdempsey

patickjdempsey — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 01:44:44 +0000

What about Themes? The default theme changes continuously. Since Firefox 4.0 there hasn’t been one release that hasn’t introduced some new feature or change that requires Theme support. Since the UX branch work began and changes from it are landing we can expect even more required support for themes. Any plans to ignore themes or should theme authors include the install.rdf switch just to make sure?

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:05:04 +0000

Progress implies change. There will always be changes in the UI/behaviour, and the UI/behaviour can’t possibly be perfect for every single user. But that change has been made in order to try to make things better. I suspect some of your addons that “fix” Firefox for you will no longer be needed, while you may find other things you don’t like that there will be new addons for. For those cases, you’ll just need to try out the new version. There’s a huge difference between Firefox 3 and Firefox 8 (the latest release version) – in fixing up the UI, improved performance, and many more modern web platform features (not to mention security fixes).

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:54:09 +0000

If any extensions.checkCompatibility.* prefs are affecting how the Add-ons Manager determines compatibility, there will be a notification at the top of the extensions list saying so, with an “Enable” button that will remove that pref.

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:49:53 +0000

The opt-out should be used very rarely and cautiously by addon authors. But it is needed, IMO - there will be addons that are just a lot more fragile than others, or may only apply to specific versions of the application. The binary component checking is done by reading the chrome.manifest files, looking for the binary-component instruction. So if an addon ships a .dll that it loads via js-ctypes (ie, it isn't a XPCOM component), that .dll won't be detected as a binary component. I have a bug on file to also parse the OS/ABI/version flags for cases where a binary component is only used on some OSes or older application versions (eg, as fallback when js-ctypes isn't available), but that's a pretty rare edge-case.

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:39:53 +0000

There shouldn’t be any risk – but it’s still being tested, and it is possible an incompatible extension will be enabled. Set to true if you want the old behaviour that will only enable extensions that explicitly say they’re compatible.