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@jorgev, you write some very helpful blog posts, however, I have one major criticism. Not just directed at you, but at Mozilla in general (I just happen to be looking in this addons area mostly).
Please stop writing documentation in blog posts and forums! Put them in, well, standardized documentation and reference manuals. You know, with a menu and categories that are quick and intuitive to get what you want. Or at the very least, blog about it for feedback, then commit them to standardized documentation and update the blog with a link at the top to refer new people who found it by search engine over to the documentation area. The DOM and JavaScript documentation is looking pretty decent. But the âmetaâ information, about how to set up an addon development environment, etc, needs improvement. You have great information, and write it well, it just has a barrier to accessibility!
It is truly maddening to have to search extensively around multiple, disparate Mozilla-run documentation sites, blogs, and now a discourse (a forum by any other nameâ¦) too, and all of this utter nonsense, just to find helpful information on basic topics. This is more than anything the biggest barrier to access of information about and development of addons. The amount of time spent trying to find documentation is excessive.
As an example, with the new requirement as of version 43+ that all addons must be signed to run (46+ without the config option to override), nowhere in the developer targeted article does it address what developers are supposed to do? Submit for signing for each and every change during the development process? Is it required to use a beta version only of the browser? How to test compatibility with the current release and a the past year or twoâs version if it canât be run? Oh, right, the answer was buried in some blog post somewhere. At least they included a link to it. We can temporarily disable the disabling of unsigned addons, per addon. But only for restartless addons? Which means all overlay addons are instantly obsoleted? Or what? Oh, your blog was written about 2 years ago, before the policy change for mandatory signing. This is an example of the reason DOCUMENTATION DOES NOT BELONG IN BLOGS!
These are all CRITICAL to writing an addon as of 46+, and ought to be covered in your otherwise great primer.
Example of URLs referred to above.
How to develop a Firefox extension
Legacy Extensions (which should address signing issues and jpm and SDK requirement)
Signing and distributing your add-on
Add-on signing in Firefox
Add-on Signing Update
Signing Firefox add-ons with jpm sign
jpm
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