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.

Add-ons Forum

As we announced before, there’s a new add-ons community forum for all topics related to AMO or add-ons in general. The old forum is still available in read-only mode, but will be permanently taken down by the end of the month.

The Review Queues

• Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.
• 330 nominations in the queue awaiting review.
• Most updates are being reviewed within 10 weeks.
• 128 updates in the queue awaiting review.
• Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 12 weeks.
• 360 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

The unlisted queues aren’t mentioned here, but they are empty for the most part. We’re in the process of getting more help to reduce queue length and waiting times for the listed queues. There are many new volunteer reviews joining us now, and a part-time contractor who should help us with the longest-waiting add-ons in the queues.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Firefox 40 Compatibility

The Firefox 40 compatibility blog post is up. The automatic compatibility validation was run last weekend. I apologize for the delay, we’re making some changes to ensure that we run them more in advance of the release.

Firefox 41 Compatibility

The compatibility blog post should come up soon.

As always, we recommend that you test your add-ons on Beta and Firefox Developer Edition (formerly known as Aurora) to make sure that they continue to work correctly. End users can install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter to identify and report any add-ons that aren’t working anymore.

Extension Signing

We announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox. The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions.

The new add-on installation UI and signature warnings are now enabled in release versions of Firefox. Signature enforcement will be turned on in 41 (with a pref to disable), and the pref will be removed on 42. The wiki page has all the details.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis, also known as e10s, is the next major compatibility change coming to Firefox. In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running content code in a different process than browser code. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

We will be talking more about these changes in this blog in the future. We recommend you look at the available documentation and adapt your add-on code as soon as possible.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/12/add-ons-update-69/