14 DAY TRIAL // Switching an entire organization, especially one that relies on the community so much, to a whole new development process in the manner of months is hard, but Mozilla seems to be doing all right. Firefox 5 is well underway and should be landing in a couple of weeks and Firefox 6 is already in the works, coming six weeks after that.
One of the big problems though is that, no matter how hard Mozilla does, some issues are out of its reach, notably add-on compatibility.
The organization took several steps to make sure that users of Firefox 5 and beyond can enjoy their favorite add-ons from day one, but the developers themselves have to make an effort as well.
The major change to ensure that add-ons are not left behind when Firefox is updated is that add-on compatibility is now automatically updated for everything in the Mozilla repositories, except in cases where the add-ons clearly won't work with the newer version.
Until now, all add-ons had to be re-reviewed before being marked as compatible with a new version of the popular browser. This had to change and Mozilla is well underway applying the new policies.
Add-ons have already been made compatible with Firefox 5, which is in beta, and they will be made compatible with Firefox 6 within days. Most add-ons should be safe, especially since the changes aren't that great between these two new versions.
Moving forward, Firefox developers may deploy new features that break compatibility with a greater number of add-ons.
"Because of the fast-paced schedule, these new releases are less problematic for add-on developers given that they include very few compatibility-breaking changes," Mozilla wrote.
Mozilla also listed the requirements for an add-on to be made compatible automatically. Finally, it also provided a full list of changes in both Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 that may break compatibility and add-ons that use any of the APIs and features listed need to be modified.
"They need to be compatible with the previous Firefox version, they must not have binary components (since they usually need to be rebuilt) and they need to pass special compatibility tests that we create based on the known breaking changes," it explained.