14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 10 has been in the beta channel for a couple of weeks now and is well underway to becoming the next Firefox. One of the big new features in the upcoming release, not so much from a technical point of view but from an impact point of view, is add-on compatibility.
Essentially, most if not all add-ons will be compatible with new Firefox version starting with Firefox 10, by default without needing any changes.
The millions of people who have been holding back on upgrading Firefox since their favorite add-ons no longer worked will know how important this simple feature is.
Of course, there has been a reason why add-ons were not made compatible by default before, problems were bound to pop up, especially when new Firefox releases introduced big changes.
But that is no longer the case and Mozilla has been moving towards a model where all add-ons are compatible by default and only the ones that are known not to work are labeled as incompatible.
However, this means that Mozilla has to know which add-ons work and which don't before a new Firefox is pushed to the stable channel and preferably as early in the development process as possible.
This is where you come in, you can help test any of the add-ons you use with the Beta, Aurora or even the Nightly channel Firefox and see if they still work.
"All add-ons will be made compatible by default in the upcoming Firefox 10 release, so it’s crunch time for testing them in Beta, Aurora, and Nightly. With default compatibility, you can expect to see less of the incompatible add-ons dialog, and more of your add-ons should just work," Mozilla explained.
"If you are a Firefox developer, support professional, or contributor, your help is critical—if you think there might be a compatibility issue in any of the release channels, please file a bug here so we can take action right away if needed," it urged.