With changes on the horizon for Firefox, the company, Mozilla, hopes to not only speed up the review process for extensions based on the API centric system in place in browsers such as Chrome and Opera but also include compatibility with their extensions and allow cross-platform extensions.
If you love both your Mozilla Firefox web-browser as well as Google Chrome, good news is on the way. Last Friday, the company, Mozilla, announced that it will be looking at how the web-browser handles extensions and uses add-ons in the future.
According to The Next Digit, with the changes being made, the API-based extensions would allow for developers to simply ‘tweak’ their coding to allow for them to work in Firefox. As well as making this process simple for developers, this would also allow for the extensions to be cross platform: extensions and add-ons for Chrome and Opera would work on Firefox too.
On Mozilla’s blog post, Mozilla stated that, “This modern and JavaScript centric API has a number of advantages, including supporting multi-process browsers by default and mitigating the risk of misbehaving add-ons and malware”.
Kev Needham, of Mozilla, also noted that, “We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors.”
With the upcoming version of Firefox, Firefox 42, coming soon, developers must seek approval with Mozilla before an extension is released for the platform.
The new process is a development in progress, as the company hopes to turn around its current ‘sluggish’ start into a speedier and more efficient process. With an expansion of volunteers and paid reviewers, the company hopes to push the wait time down below what it currently sits at.
“Our goal is to increase automation of the review process so that the wait time for reviews of new WebExtensions listed on addons.mozilla.org can be reduced to five days, and that the wait time for updates to existing WebExtensions can be reduced to one to two days,” notes Mozilla’s Kev Needham.