Mozilla Needs Help Reviewing Firefox Add-ons

Mozilla is going through quite a lot of changes right now. It's transitioning to a multi-channel Firefox release, with a fresh new build every six weeks, so everything related to it is affected, including add-ons.

One of the major concerns with each Firefox release until now was add-on compatibility, since developers had to upgrade their add-ons and Mozilla had to review them.

This clearly won't work with the new schedule so add-ons will be automatically made compatible with new releases, with some exceptions.

This means that developers can simply update their add-ons whenever they have something to add, but Mozilla still gets plenty of add-on submissions, both new ones as well as updates, all of which have to be reviewed.

Mozilla relies on a number of volunteer add-on reviewers, Editors as they're known, who make sure that all add-ons in the official repository are safe and work properly.

But the team is having trouble keeping up with the volume of add-ons submitted each day and is asking for help.

"In the past couple of years we have been working hard to reduce waiting times, and we were doing really well. New add-ons were reviewed in under 2 weeks and updates in under 5 days. All was well and we were all pretty happy," Mozilla's Jorge Villalobos wrote.

"Then 2 things happened: Firefox 4 was launched, and we reformed our review process in a way that demanded all add-ons submissions to be reviewed," he explained.

"We are now getting much more submissions (which is great!), and while we have been able to keep updates reviews roughly under a week, new submissions are taking longer than we would like," he added.

So Mozilla is asking for help from experienced Firefox add-on developers to lend their time to reviewing add-ons. It's not exactly the most glamorous of jobs and there aren't that many rewards, but that shouldn't stop developers wanting to contribute to a bigger thing.