How doesFirefox and Chrome's quick update cycles affect the development of add-ons and extensions, if at all?

Question

Would a developer simply be wise to check if their extension functions properly upon every release or is there a more efficient way?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not too sure about Chrome, but Mozilla has an automatic update checker system that checks your addon to see if it is compatible with new Firefox releases. You get an email telling you whether your addon passed the tests or not. More info here: http://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/

Answer 2

I would definitely recommend that any Firefox add-on developer have all current versions of Firefox installed (Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release) and at least do basic checks to ensure that their add-on is working on all these version of Firefox. Things do still break, sometimes in the most expected ways.

In addition, Mozilla provides resources to let add-on developers know what is coming in future releases, so we can be prepared. Their are blog posts:

http://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2012/05/11/compatibility-for-firefox-13/

And there are more through pages on MDN:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_13_for_developers https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_14_for_developers https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_15_for_developers

Answer 3

Chrome has specific APIs that are available to extensions, whereas Firefox gives you access to pretty much all of the browser internals. This means it's very possible that you'd write a Firefox extension using an API that Mozilla never thought you'd use, so when Firefox updates, your extension breaks. Though as Yansky says, Mozilla does a great job of detecting problems and warning you about them. Since Chrome has specific APIs that you can use, I don't think this would ever be a problem unless they deprecated one of them.