14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is looking at several ways of dealing with the problem of out-of-date add-ons for Firefox which has become a lot worse now that a new Firefox is coming once every six weeks.
Before Firefox 4, all add-ons had to be manually updated to make them compatible with whatever the new version was.
This wouldn't scale with a six-week release schedule, so automatic updates for compatibility were implemented.
For add-ons built with the Add-on SDK, formerly the Jetpack project, another issue was the SDK itself being updated for each Firefox release, leaving the add-ons out of date or incompatible with the latest version.
"If you host your add-on, built with the SDK, on AMO (addons.mozilla.org), we would automatically rebuild it everytime we release a new version of the Add-on SDK to maintain compatibility with a new version of Firefox," Mozilla explained.
"This would make sure that your add-on was always up-to-date with the latest version of Firefox," it said.
That was the idea anyway, it didn't quite work out as hoped, so Mozilla is coming up with new solutions.
There were a couple of issues that could have been foreseen, like the fact that the "repacker" was the first to use the new updating APIs for the Add-ons Mozilla (AMO) site. Inherent bugs were discovered and this slowed down the process.
But one thing that popped up and which couldn't be easily fixed was that the process of taking an add-on packaged as an .xpi file, modifying its contents and then repackaging it, without access to the original source files, led to a lot of issues and errors.
So Mozilla is backing down on its plans, but only temporarily. For now, only extensions created with the Add-on Builder, Mozilla's online tool, will be automatically repackaged, since the source code and all the resources are available.
In the long term, things aren't as clear, but there are a couple of ideas. One would be to include the source code for each app, as a separate file to keep .xpi files from getting too big, in the cloud. But this adds a lot of complexity to AMO.
Another, perhaps preferred option would be to build some parts of the Add-on SDK into Firefox so that they get updated along with the browser, eliminating the need for developers to update their apps, in some cases.