It’s been a long ride but we can finally say it. This week Firefox 21 shipped and it includes the add-on SDK modules.
What does this mean? Well for users it means two important things:
- Smaller add-ons. Since they no longer need to ship the APIs themselves add-ons only have to include the unique code that makes them special. That’s something like a 65% file-size saving for the most popular SDK based add-ons, probably more for simpler add-ons.
- Add-ons will stay compatible with Firefox for longer. We can evolve the modules in Firefox that add-ons use so that most of the time when changes happen to Firefox the modules seamlessly shift to keep working. There are still some cases where that might be impossible (when a core feature is dropped from Firefox for example) but hopefully those should be rare.
To take advantage of these benefits add-ons have to be repacked with a recent version of the SDK. We’re working on a plan to do that automatically for existing add-ons where possible but developers who want to get the benefits right now can just repack their add-ons themselves using SDK 1.14 and using cfx xpi --strip-sdk, or using the next release of the SDK, 1.15 which will do that by default.
Does it ship with the SDK on Android too?
If it does, is there any reference documentation about the limitations of the SDK on Android?
Yes and yes, see the bottom of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/dev-guide/tutorials/mobile.html
Fantastic news and thanks for doing this hard work.