AMO rejects cfx packaged add-on

Our Add-on (Dragon Web Extension) was rejected today because it is being packaged using cfx. I was not aware this was going to happen. Was there a notification that I missed?

Can we please allow this to be signed? The Add-on works fine in my testing in the latest builds of Firefox. We are waiting for WebExtensions to be allowed in AMO before porting our Add-On. It does not make sense to us to spend time porting this extension to jpm only to port it again to WebExtensions. Please advise on what we can do.

Is this the right place for these questions? With all of the different avenues of communication with Mozilla, I find it hard to know the right place.

Thank you
Nuance Development

1 Like

Add-ons packed with cfx will not work any longer in recent Firefox versions. Migrating to jpm should only take a couple of minutes. For a guide, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/cfx_to_jpm .

Thanks for the quick follow up.

In our case the move to jpm is not quick or easy. We use many build
machines to build all of our software including the Firefox extension. It
is costly to update all of these machines. There is also a process in place
for requesting a change to these build machines. That will cause multiple
people to lose time over this. Not at all simple. If we go straight to
WebExtensions we don’t need to go through that process at all. We already
have a working Chrome extension to port over and we do not need to update
any build machines. I am not sure why Mozilla moved so fast to deprecate
working software before the replacement technologies were in place.

Please remove the restriction on cfx Add-ons. Liked I said before, our
extension works fine in the latest Firefox.

Nuance Development

1 Like

On Android, this breaks simple prefs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1167246
It’s not clear to me whether this bug will be fixed, or whether there will be another version of jpm. Some API’s remain unimplemented on Android (clipboard, context menu, UI, etc). I have an addon that adds to the main menu - could I do that in jpm?
Are all efforts now going into webextensions now?

As I said, add-ons packed with cfx won’t work in recent Firefox versions, there it does not make any sense to allow them (and then have reviewers manually reject them because they don’t work during testing).

I don’t know for sure whether that bug is being worked on, but I don’t think so. I guess your best shot is submitting a patch yourself.

Sombody has attempted a fix, but failed. And Eric Vold reckons it tricky.

But can anyone answer my other question? Is the plan, for fennec addons, to fix jpm and write the missing APIs, or has it been adandoned in favour of webextensions? Who can answer that?

The plan for Android is unclear. We will continue to support the APIs that exist at the moment, and ideally we will also support it with WebExtensions. However, that’s not a launch priority, which is why we’re keeping what works for now.