planning on Oxymoronical

What's next for the Add-ons Manager?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:52:14 +0000

Firefox 4 is just around the corner and it’s great to look back over just how far the Add-ons Manager has come since Firefox 3.6. In fact if you want to see the full history look at my earlier post that shows its evolution since Phoenix 0.2. We set out with some pretty lofty goals for Firefox 4 and I’m pretty excited at just how many of them we achieved. I hope everyone appreciates the hard work that Blair, Boriss, Justin, Henrik, Ben, myself and all the others put in to get us to where we are today.

Support for dropping XPI files into the extension install locations might be going away

Thu, 27 May 2010 23:22:05 +0000

For some time now Firefox has supported a way of installing extensions that involves simply copying the extension’s XPI file into one of the extension install locations. The next time Firefox runs it would pop up the install dialog for the extension and allow the user to choose whether to install it or not.

I don’t know how many people use this feature and while the code to do it (at least for the profile folder) isn’t terribly complex, it is additional code that may not be necessary. Right now the new add-ons manager doesn’t support it and I’ve heard only a couple of people comment on its absence but nightly testers are by no means representational so I’m asking a little more widely whether people have a real need for keeping this working in Firefox 4?

Add-ons manager re-landed

Mon, 10 May 2010 23:36:46 +0000

A little sort of coincidental performance regression forced us to back out the new add-ons manager last week. It has now been re-landed with added bug fixes and should be in tomorrow’s nightly.

How do restartless add-ons work?

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:41:48 +0000

I blogged a short time ago about how we’re adding support for a new form of add-on to Firefox that can install and uninstall without needing to restart the application. Since then I’ve been finalizing a specification for how the platform will load these add-ons, trying to keep it simple but still give developers everything they commonly need. The planned specification is now available and if developers have comments then I’d like to hear them. Currently there isn’t a version of Firefox that implements it but that should change in the next day or so when I make the changes to the add-ons manager project branch and very soon when it all lands on trunk.

Do we need extension dependencies?

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:50:42 +0000

Ever since Firefox 2 we have vaguely supported a form of extension dependency. That is marking an extension as requiring particular versions of another extension.

The support is currently very limited and when a user tries to use an add-on that depends on something they don’t have they are pretty much left in the cold. While we tell them it requires something we don’t tell that what it requires or give them any easy way to download and install it.

Third-party extension installation status

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:04:05 +0000

I have been remiss in not posting a status update about this in two weeks, but that is mostly because we have unfortunately had to slow down work on this feature. The problem is that a string freeze became necessary for all toolkit code (the code shared with the Firefox mobile browser and where this feature would have lived). Unfortunately this all came up over a small period when I was travelling long distances and having to take time out to satisfy immigration authorities that I wasn’t a terrorist intent on bringing down the U.S. government.

Third-party add-on notification progress, the lite edition

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:36:12 +0000

This week has been the Firefox work week where almost all of the team, including me, made our way to Mountain View. This pretty much means that you spend the entire week in meetings since when you’re remote it can be hard to keep in sync on everything. Of course this means that the amount of coding is pretty low for the week so there isn’t a great deal of progress to report here.

Progress on notifying users about third-party add-ons

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:28:41 +0000

This is a weekly status update on the feature to notify users about add-ons that third-party installers have added to Firefox. You can read more about it in last weeks blog post or on the project wiki.

Status

There has been little progress this week mostly due to waiting to see whether the doorhanger notifications UI was going to arrive in time for Firefox 3.6. It looks like it isn’t so instead we are discussing using an in-content page to describe the add-ons that have been installed and allowing users to disable them.

Notifying users about third-party add-ons

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:48:52 +0000

You may have noticed many of the Firefox team starting to blog progress reports on Fridays. This is a part of our new plan to clearly define the main projects we are all working on and communicate a much as possible about them rather than just having users surprised to see them turn up in nightlies. So here is my report for this week:

I’ve been working on improving the level of information and control we give users over add-ons installed by other applications on the system (think Skype, Java, AV tools etc.). The work for this is being tracked in bug 476430 and on the project wiki.

Improving the add-on install experience

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:44:13 +0000

Add-on developers face a bit of a challenge when it comes to helping users get the most out of their add-ons. Even once you are past the first hurdle and have got a user to install the add-on, you then need to help them get up and running quickly after Firefox has restarted. Presented with just the blank Firefox window it can be difficult for a user to know where to go next. Many add-on developers have taken to including a first-run experience to give the user some help. Display a webpage with some instructions or open a wizard to start setting up. As this practice started it was generally acceptable. Few add-ons actually did anything so it was helpful. These days though many add-ons are doing it, no doubt with more to come. It is starting to be an annoyance in some cases. Others have already been discussing ways that we can improve this.

Why change is hard

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:56:21 +0000

This is really not the ideal set of interactions between the extension manager and its related components. Unfortunately changing it is going to be hard.

interdependencies

Unfortunately adding any new features is also pretty hard until at least some of these dependencies are broken.

Letting add-ons perform work during install and uninstall

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:31:59 +0000

One of the biggest requested items I see in the add-ons newsgroups and IRC channel is from developers asking how to perform some work when their add-on is installed or uninstalled. Previously it has been vaguely possible to do this, but there is a lot of hassle involved and it wouldn’t always work right.

As part of my roadmap for improving the extension manager we are talking about adding real support for these sorts of activities. The draft specification covers the proposal in more details but in draft it allows the following:

What's up with the extension manager?

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:31:46 +0000

Some time ago (wow was it really 5 months!) I blogged about some plans I have had for the future of the extension manager. I think it’s time for a short review of what it going on.

I said at the time that any of the timescales mentioned we’re very rough and certain to be underestimates, but I didn’t quite appreciate how true that was at the time. Despite tripling most of the times we’re still almost nowhere along implemented most of the ideas.

Planning for the future

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:24:26 +0000

For some time now I’ve been throwing around ideas for new features that we may want for the add-ons manager. After lots of thought and trying to take on board comments from anyone that would pipe up I decided it was high time to put together an actual plan for what features I have decided should be pursued and what order to start tackling them.

The roadmap itself should be pretty self explanatory, just remember that nothing is ever set in stone. I’ll try to keep it updated as things change, features seem less important or new items are added. But for now this is how I see the add-ons manager evolving over the course of about the next year or so, which may be the next two versions after Firefox 3.1.

What's the Future for Add-ons Management?

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:07:56 +0000

With Firefox 3 getting ever closer to release it is time (well, past time) to start thinking about the future. The Extension Manager has seen quite a number of improvements since Firefox 2. Many were designed to be invisible, generally improving stability and fixing oddities. Some are extremely visible such as the new security requirements and the addons.mozilla.org integration. The question is, what’s the next step for add-ons management?

Here are a few ideas that are floating around my mind to get you started:

Securing Add-on Updates

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Since the disclosure of potential vulnerabilities in the way Firefox (and other Mozilla applications) automatically update your add-ons we have been discussing how to tighten up the system in a way that is hopefully unnoticeable to users and not much extra work for add-on authors.

After a process of listening to authors on the newsgroups, forums and by email we now have a rough proposal of what changes we are looking to make. There’s still a few minor details to be ironed out of course. This is mainly of interest to add-on authors since there is an impact depending on how you host your updates. I’ve started threads on the newsgroup and forums so if you want to discuss the proposal there then that’d be good. I’d prefer it if you didn’t edit the main page of the wiki but feel free to stick small comments onto the discussion page.