Releases/Firefox 5 add-on compatibility

It has been expressed that the biggest risk to Firefox 5 is add-on compatibility. We only have a week or two left so any action items that need lead time need to be discussed now.

Goals

• Figure out where we are at for fx5 add-on compatibility
• Figure out where we want to be for Firefox 5's release
• Figure out what we need to do to get there

Non-goals

• Will not discuss mitigation strategies here
• Will not discuss longer-term (post Fx5) solutions

Issues auto-marking extensions on AMO

Making sure our AMO compatibility percentage reflects reality

• The reserved keyword bug
  • Would it be worth investigating a product backout for that bug?
  • Jorge says there are only 2 really...not as big a deal as originally thought
  • This was found when an add-on author found the issue and notified us
  • How can we find other issues like this?
    • Not easily, the auto-bumping tool input is gathered manually
• How confident are we that issues like this aren't lurking (marking stuff compatible when they aren't)
  • Tomcat has been testing
    • We bumped 1,000s, he's awesome but can't test them all plus all the combinations
  • We can check update pings for versions automatically bumped
    • fligtar / Jorge will get the data

List of top add-ons we are concerned about

The top extensions with complaints are:

• Google toolbar
• Norton (various)
• AVG safe search
• Roboform
• Yahoo toolbar
• Fastdial
• Avast (Toolbar?)
• Internet Download manager (and possibly other youtube downloaders)
• Bitdefender (toolbar?)
• ZoneAlarm
• Facebook/zynga toolbars
• Logmein (plugin?)
• Runescape (and various conduit toolbars)
• Greasemonkey
• Evernote
• McAfee

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659176 has more but I don't have info on those.

Non-binary

• If an add-on is using the SDK (which we know is compatible) should we have Firefox ignore the compat information?
  • No, and the number of add-ons probably wouldn't make a difference

Binary add-ons

• Is there something we can do for those hosted on addons.mozilla.org?
  • Not really, developers need to recompile

• What's the fix rate for those hosted on addons.mozilla.org and incompatible with Fx5?
  • Really, really low. The source is emailed and we haven't seen many updated

• Is the binary XPCOM compatibility bump able to be backed out if we need it?
  • What would the ill effects be?
  • bsmedberg and johnath said previously this is not on the table

• Cooliris is blocked on bug 653971. It's on AMO, is binary, and marked incompatible with Fx5
  • Set for release drivers to track
  • We should try to figure out other add-ons that are blocked on similar engineering work

Outreach

• Would it help to offer engineers to people?
  • Kev says most people are on top of it, just takes time to work through their eng process

• Would it help to email add-on developers again?
  • fligtar thinks that targeted emails will help, email blast will not

• Kev says a big thing for binary components is having a HOWTO support multiple Fx versions with binary add-ons
  • Kev is working on it

Data we need

• A list of the most popular add-ons not on AMO (regardless of compatibility). This should help us prioritize Fx5 incompatible add-on outreach
  • fligtar / Jorge will get

• A prioritized list of add-ons we care about, their compatibility status, if they are binary, and steps we are trying to get them compatible
  • LINKED HERE.

• What's the rate non-binary add-ons on AMO are being marked compatible with Fx5?
  • Hard to tell, not comparable to Fx4
  • We'd like to project what the non-binary Fx5 add-on on AMO % for Fx5 on June 21st
  • fligtar / Jorge will get (?)

• What's the rate binary add-ons on AMO are being marked compatible with Fx5?
  • Slow / negligible

• Rank the list of binary add-ons on AMO not compatible with Fx5 by overall usage
  • Will let us know which need explicit outreach
  • fligtar / Jorge will get (?)

• How many users have at least one add-on that is incompatible. Put another way, how many people will see the window saying their add-ons will be incompatible before the update is downloaded?
  • Note that this is different than overall compatibility...if a user has 9 add-ons compatible and one that is not, the update behavior will be similar to having all 10 add-ons marked as incompatible
  • fligtar / Jorge will get the common sets of add-ons so we can figure out the probability that at least one incompatible add-on will be installed for a given user