Canmove, confirm, emeritus
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{{FeaturePageBody
|Feature open issues and risks=What mitigations are mitigation is needed to detect and fix negative effects of truly incompatible add-on negative effectsons? Some number of extensions out there in the dark matter will be genuinely incompatible and some number of those incompatible extensions will be broken in ways that may not be easy for the user to manage through or around.
|Feature overview=The vast majority of add-ons work from one version of Firefox to the next without the need for developer maintenance, but under the current system, compatibility information must be updated in order for Firefox to enable the add-on for use. For add-ons hosted on AMO, this is done automatically. However, 75% of add-ons in use are not hosted on AMO, and are therefore a major compatibility obstacle for our users. All of the compatibility effort put into each release is simply because Firefox still assumes add-ons will be incompatible between versions, when they usually aren't.
When users upgrade to a new version of Firefox, only the add-ons that are actually incompatible should be disabled, and the rest are assumed to be compatible. Because Nightly, Aurora, and Beta users will test out the add-ons for weeks before stable users, we should be able to identify and blacklist incompatible add-ons before stable users would be affected by a truly incompatible add-on.
|Feature non-goals=This plan is not trying to solve the issue of binary compatibility between releases.
|Feature functional spec='''Firefox'''
When Firefox wants to update to a new version, it should determine which add-ons are incompatible and which will be assumed compatible by looking at the following:
3. Next, Firefox will look for binary components in the add-on. If binary components are found, the add-on is incompatible and should be disabled in the new version of Firefox.
4. Finally, for all add-ons, Firefox will look at the metadata it received from AMO and the compatibility presented there will override all of the previous checks. AMO may report that the add-on is actually not compatible with the new version, or it may report that it is compatible with the new version. If there is no compatibility information returned for the particular version of the add-on with the particular version of Firefox, the fallback methods should be usedcompatibility is unchanged from steps 1-3.
Firefox will then inform the user, if necessary, about incompatible add-ons, or update to the new version and automatically enable the add-ons that would otherwise be incompatible.
When Firefox first enables incompatible add-ons, it should perform a self-test to ensure windows are rendering properly and there are no missing string entities. Crashing several times in a row or force quitting should cause Firefox to start in safe mode so the problem add-on can be identified.
'''AMO'''
AMO needs to return compatibility information about add-ons, even non-hosted ones, in its GUID search API responses.
We should have an interface to the Add-on Compatibility Reporter reports that allows for easy compatibility blacklisting of top incompatible add-ons.
'''Add-on Compatibility Reporter'''
The ACR should be revamped to better fits its new role of reporting when add-ons are not compatible, rather than when they are compatible. For example, when a user disables an add-on, it should provide a user with the opportunity to say it's because it doesn't work. And it should look for other signs of incompatibility, similar to the self-tests.
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