In the early days of rapid release, we switched the default behaviour of
(some) add-ons from strict compatibility checks against Firefox (and
other toolkit-using application) versions, to compatible-by-default.
This was to make life easier for add-on authors and users.
We were worried that we might need to override compatibility for
existing add-ons in the field, if it turned out that defaulting to
compatible for that add-on caused updated versions of Firefox to fail.
To defend against this, we block startup the first time an updated
version runs in order to get up-to-date compatibility information from
addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
Because blocking startup is generally a bad idea, and is particularly
bad when AMO is unreachable, we're working on a couple of ways to relax
the compatibility check:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=772484 is about allowing
users to skip waiting for the AMO metadata ping, and
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=760356 is about not always
doing the metadata ping.
I've written up a fairly long blog post about this at
http://www.controlledflight.ca/2014/01/07/add-on-compatibility-checks-and-new-firefox-versions/;
please take discussion there or to mozilla.dev.platform.
--
- irving -
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