Mozilla Is Retiring the Experimental Lab Kit for Firefox

Mozilla has announced that it's shutting down Lab Kit, a Firefox extension bundle Mozilla Labs used to test several experimental add-ons at a time without having users constantly check for updates or managing several add-ons that may or not may get updates in the future.

It unveiled it about a year ago, but Mozilla has decided to retire it since it's no longer compatible with Firefox 7, or any future versions, and, apparently, Mozilla has no interest in maintaining it anymore. It was also causing problems with add-on updates.

Of course, any of the separate add-ons that are included in Lab Kit will continue to live on independently of the bundle.

"We’re retiring the Lab Kit bundle of add-ons on Tuesday, October 11, due to compatibility issues with Firefox 7 and future Firefox browser releases," Mozilla Lab's Edward Lee announced.

"We recommend that you uninstall Lab Kit and restart Firefox at your earliest convenience to avoid having the Add-on Manager get stuck at 'Updating add-ons'," he explained.

"Firefox will automatically remove the Lab Kit add-on early next week to restore Firefox’s add-on update functionality and avoid potential stability and security problems," he also said.

The idea behind Mozilla Lab Kit was to make it easier for Mozilla to push experimental add-ons, which is what Labs focuses on, to adventurous users. Those that would install Lab Kit would effectively signal to Mozilla that they're ready for whatever the devs can throw at them.

This should ensure a solid user base for anything that Mozilla wanted tested without having to promote it too much to convince people to install it.

For whatever, reason, it's possible that it wasn't very widely used, the Add-ons Mozilla page certainly indicates that, it is now no longer needed. It hadn't been updated in a while either. If you've been using it, all of the add-ons in the bundle are still available as stand-alones.