NOTE: I wrote this on WordPress.com and would've put it in the add-ons blog as a draft to review, but I am having some LDAP error and can't publish it there. So here it is for review, let me know!
The state of add-ons has changed a lot over the past five years, with Jetpack add-ons rising in popularity and Web Extensions on the horizon. Our validation process hasn't changed as much as the ecosystem it validates, so today Mozilla is announcing its new Add-ons Validator, written in JS and available for testing today!
Add-ons are a huge part of the Firefox system and a fantastic reason to use Firefox. We already have [NUMBER OF ADDONS] available and with work underway to allow Web Extensions in Firefox, we'll see a lot more soon. For add-ons to be listed on the Firefox Add-ons site, they need to be reviewed and approved by Mozilla's add-on review team. The first step in this review process is automated validation using our Add-ons Validator.
Add-ons validation is important: it alerts reviewers to deprecated API usage, errors, and bad practices. Add-ons can contain a lot of code; our validation alerts reviewers to possible problems and lets them focus on bits of add-ons that could make your browser buggy or slow. It also lets us make sure add-ons aren't doing anything malicious with your browsing data! The Add-ons validator helps keep your browsing fast and safe.
But our current validator is a bit old, long in the tooth, and because it's written in Python with JavaScript dependencies: our old validator is difficult for add-on developers to install themselves. This means add-on developers often don't know about validation errors until they submit their add-on for review.
This wastes add-on developers' time and reviewers' time, introducing a feedback cycle that could have been avoided if the add-on developer could have just ran addons-validator myAddon.xpi before they uploaded their add-on. If developers could easily check their add-ons for errors locally, getting their add-ons in front of millions of users is that much faster.
Well, now they can!
I'm not a fan of massive rewrites, but in this case it really helps. Add-ons developers are JavaScript coders and nearly everyone involved in web development these days uses Node.js. We've written the new validator in JavaScript and published it on npm: you can install it right now.
We took this opportunity to review all the rules the old add-on validator defined: there were a lot of outdated rules dating back to Gecko 6. We've removed a lot of outdated rules; some of them haven't been encountered on addons.mozilla.org for years. This has allowed us to cut down on code footprint and make a faster, leaner, and easier-to-work-with validator for the future.
Speaking of which...
We're still porting over relevant rules from the old validator. Our three objectives are:
- Porting old rules (discarding outdated ones where necessary)
- Adding support for Web Extensions
- Getting the new validator running in production
We're looking for help with those first two objectives, so if you'd like to help us make our slightly ambitious full-project-rewrite-deadline, you can...
If you're an add-ons developer, JavaScript programmer, or both: we'd love your help! Our code and issue tracker are on GitHub at github.com/mozilla/addons-validator. We keep a healthy backlog of issues available, so you can help us add rules, review code, or test things out there. We also have a good first bug label if you're new to add-ons but want to contribute!
If you'd like to try the next-generation add-ons validator, you can install it with npm: npm install addons-validator. Run your add-ons against it and let us know what you think. We'd love your feedback as GitHub issues, or emails on the add-ons developer mailing list.
And if you're an add-ons developer who wishes the validator did something it currently doesn't, please let us know!
We're really excited about the future of add-ons at Mozilla; we hope this new validator will help people write better add-ons. It should make writing add-ons faster, help reviewers get through more add-ons, and will ultimately result in more awesome add-ons available for all Firefox users.
Happy hacking!