Mozilla has announced a change in policy for Firefox add-on compatibility. This feature is again inspired by Google Chrome, where extension developers don’t need to manually check and update their extensions for every next release.
Under the present policy, a Firefox add-on is marked compatible with a new version of Firefox only when its developer checks and updates the records in AMO manually, even if the add-on has no issue with the new release. If the developer fails to update the compatibility records – users have to miss the add-on. Process of updating the version compatibility takes a lot of time, and affects the end users finally.
Mozilla’s Justin Scott describes the new proposal as, "Add-ons hosted on AMO that are compatible with the previous major release will be automatically marked as compatible with a version just before it branches to Aurora unless we detect that the add-on is broken. Users of Aurora, Beta, and final releases should automatically have compatibility for the vast majority of their add-ons.".
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This change is a big relief for add-on developers and users. As Firefox has adopted a rapid release cycle now, add-on compatibility will not be a major issue now.
