To be able to support this, they're going to need to do some major overhaul of how add-on versioning works. As a Add-On developer (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/font-finder/), I shudder at the thought of 10,000 different addons needing to keep having their support version incremented w/ each upcoming release.
I lead the add-ons team at Mozilla. Add-on compatibility was definitely a big consideration in our plans to switch to a faster release cycle, and we're working on proposing some changes to the way it works. As you mention, the current way of doing things won't work 4 times a year.
These changes will probably include automatic compatibility with certain major versions. We'll have more to share soon on the add-ons blog.
forgive me if i'm wrong, but i couldn't help but feel like the documentation for upgrading addons from 3 to 4 was extremely scarce and scattered. i pieced together several documents from MDC, the developer forum, and the Mozilla blog, and still couldn't get a full view of the changes that affected my addon.
revisiting the submission process itself is welcome and seemingly necessary; but i'd be willing to deal with an inefficient submission process if the upgrade was well documented.
Personally, I think that the compatibility should be based on feature versions. If an addon says "I use version x of feature y", and that feature doesn't get touched for 20 versions, it would be automatically compatible.
I have 21 different add-ons on AMO right now, and while it's kind of annoying to do so, it only takes me about 10 minutes to update the maxVersion on all of them every time a new version of Firefox comes out. Of course, the problem isn't that it's hard or takes a long time to do; the problem is that developers forget to do it.
Maybe it's time for Mozilla to move to using minVersion only, like Chrome does.
That requires a major commitment to backwards compatibility, which is a massive time-suck and reduces your ability to innovate. Look at Microsoft for an example of how nasty that can be.
It's not necessarily any worse than if the developer simply doesn't care enough to test it/update it. It might be better to use minVersion, then have plugins that use deprecated functions disabled.
This announcement doesn't say anything about versioning for the underlying mozilla platform (which moves from 1.92 to 2.0 between Firefox 3.6 and 4.0). The versioning for the platform only changes when the api changes and breaks binary compatibility for people who use binary components in extensions. Authors writing pure JavaScript extensions can code them to be compatible across multiple Firefox versions.
You're right. But they have been making a simultaneous push toward the Jetpack addons (as opposed to the traditional extensions), which are apparently less of a hassle to deal with in terms of versioning and compatibility.
