Where is the updated Nightly Tester Tools?

Many of you nightly testers may have noticed that Nightly Tester Tools’ compatibility override feature doesn’t work with the new add-ons manager and may be wondering when I’m planning to issue an update to fix that. The more astute of you may have noticed that there hasn’t actually been a real code update to Nightly Tester Tools in 2 years, barring a couple of simple app compatibility fixes. Those with a sharp memory will remember that I said just under 2 years ago that I was ceasing work on my extensions in my spare time. I suggested that Nightly Tester Tools might still receive the odd update but obviously that hasn’t happened and the truth is that I can’t see it happening anytime soon. I’m too busy with that whole real life thing to even be able to work on projects I do enjoy, let alone maintain old stuff that no longer really interests me.

This unfortunately leaves a sizable number of users losing a feature that they liked and still potentially have a need for. I can only really see a couple of possible roads to follow from here:

  1. Do nothing. Users will be annoyed for a time but eventually find ways around what they needed NTT for.
  2. Find someone else to pick up and maintain NTT. I’ve had numerous requests for the source code for many of my extensions over the past two years, none have ever apparently tried to do anything though. Perhaps someone out there will pick up the torch this time?
  3. Point all the users to something else, like the Add-on Compatibility Reporter (once that is updated to work on trunk). While nothing else I know of works quite like NTT at least something is better than nothing, and ACR has the benefit of being Mozilla supported, provides Mozilla with valuable information about add-on compatibility and may be rolled into Firefox at some point.

Option 3 is the only one available that involves any work on my part but probably the choice that leads to less user annoyance, unless someone reading this wants to take up the challenge or has a better idea?

Update: Part of the Mozilla QA team are going to take over development and maintenance of Nightly Tester Tools, let them know what you want to see!

6 thoughts on “Where is the updated Nightly Tester Tools?”

  1. We’re just ironing out the final quirks to get the Add-on Compatibility Reporter working with the new add-ons manager. For anyone interested, follow bug 564870. Bug 565610 is the only hard blocker at this point.

  2. There is also the MR-Tech Toolkit extension, which includes NTT functionality along with a lot of other functionalities (which may be seen as “essential, “useful”, “interesting” or “bloat” depending on point of view).

    Of course, that extension got broken (in its extension-management functionalities) by the new addons manager, but AFAIK Mel Reyes is still maintaining it, and I don’t doubt that he will make it compatible with Fx 3.7, but when? Rumour has it that he’s waiting for the dust to settle on the new addons manager. I think he’ll have it in time for Fx 3.7.0 final and probably much earlier than that, but that’s only my own gut feeling.

  3. Any chance you can put the code in a public repository somewhere?
    Then maybe us users could take a peek and carry on.
    In any case, thanks for the great work in the add-on, I certainly going to miss “Insert List of Extension into Textbox” ='(

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