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Extensions and beta-testing Firefox

By glazou on Monday 7 April 2008, 10:13 - Mozilla - Permalink

The most painful thing for people like me who dropped Firefox 2 long ago to rely on alphas and betas of Firefox 3 is extensions. Extensions have a maxVersion field. Let's say the last official beta of Firefox 3 is beta3 ; the greateast maxVersion available is then 3.0b4pre. When Firefox 3 goes to beta 4, it's upgraded to 3.0b5pre. But not before. Most of the extensions I use on a daily basis are disabled in my Firefox because there are no updates. Seriously, we all suffer from this, in particular with venkman, SQLite manager and other programming add-ons, and I think another way of doing should be found. Here's what could be done for nightlies only, it could be entirely disabled for official releases.

  1. make the nightly accept an extension even if its maxVersion is less than the current version of Firefox IF its maxVersion and the version of Firefox share the same leading numerical value.
  2. in that case, this extension would be listed as "At risk" at startup time in a special alert dialog.

Update:

<db48x> glazou: you do know that you can turn off extension compatibility
        checking by setting a pref, right?
<db48x> glazou: extensions.checkCompatibility?
<db48x> it's easy to miss

Comments

1. On Monday 7 April 2008, 10:33 by Michael(tm) Smith

Yes, please. I run Minefield (and Webkit nightlies and Opera snapshots), and this change would make it more usable (and more attractive to use) for me.

2. On Monday 7 April 2008, 11:02 by D

Isn't is safer to have testers opt-in to overriding the maxVersion check with Nightly Tester Tools, instead of doing it automatically?

3. On Monday 7 April 2008, 11:24 by JN

Relieved (in fact not !) to read that even big developpers of Firefox extensions share the same issues...

I would be glad to read your solution !

4. On Monday 7 April 2008, 11:35 by ondrejd

Whow, I don't know about the extensions.checkCompatibility - it's really great! thanks!

5. On Monday 7 April 2008, 11:35 by Klint

Ongoing discussion: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b...

6. On Monday 7 April 2008, 12:53 by glandium

At least, now, there is a dialog telling you which extensions are not going to be compatible with the version you are going to upgrade to... well, it would be nice if it didn't lie... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b...

7. On Monday 7 April 2008, 15:26 by David Naylor

Wow, I'm kind of surprised that Daniel didn't know about that.

Another way to do it is to install the Nightly Tester Tools extension, which basically does the same thing. (And a few other things.)

8. On Monday 7 April 2008, 22:14 by Wladimir Palant

Yes, it is painful. I try to keep up with trunk development with my extensions - and still every time a new beta comes out I get tons of complains that my extension isn't compatible. Because I can mark it compatible with the beta and subsequent nightlies only when the beta is out and not a week earlier for example (AMO policy).

9. On Tuesday 8 April 2008, 03:47 by Dan

D, David: Nightly Tester Tools just gives a GUI to the extensions.checkCompatibility pref.

I also found setting extensions.checkUpdateSecurity to false helped get some old extensions working in firefox 3b1, but that might have been because the new AMO wasn't up at that point?

Anyways I'm surprised you didn't know about extensions.checkCompatibility... or even just Nightly Tester Tools.

10. On Tuesday 8 April 2008, 16:00 by justdave

Nightly Tester Tools also lets you override extensions one at a time and specifically, in addition to doing it globally. This is way safer than just overriding everything at once. Then you can do just the important ones and make sure they all work and so forth.