Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus for Firefox and Element Hiding Helper development builds now hosted on AMO · 2015-09-04 16:42 by Wladimir Palant

Mozilla is starting to enforce their signing on all add-ons: Firefox 40 already warns about unsigned add-ons, Firefox 41 Beta outright disables them. This isn’t a big issue for our add-on releases as these are signed by addons.mozilla.org (AMO) automatically. However, the development builds were hosted on our own servers until recently, no such signing there.

Because of that, a few weeks ago we moved our development builds to AMO to have them signed automatically. You can also download them from AMO directly (see Development Channel section in the extension description). Anybody who installed development builds from our website should be upgraded to the AMO-hosted builds automatically.

It took us a while to get there, mostly because we couldn’t see any good options. Our development builds are created automatically and we didn’t want to start uploading them to AMO manually. AMO thinks about providing a proper upload API but there hasn’t been much progress in this area yet. So rather than waiting further we decided to instrument the existing web interface — not a terribly elegant or reliable solution but it works for now.

Also, the way AMO presented the development channel wasn’t optimal. It was impossible to link to this section directly, so the instructions would have to go like this: “open page, scroll to the bottom, click on Development Channel to expand.” Fortunately, AMO is open-source, so we helped resolve the issues, our changes are live as of yesterday.

We still have two extensions which are meant for internal use and aren’t hosted on AMO: Diagnostics for Adblock Plus and Adblock Plus Unit Tests. It looks like we will start hosting Diagnostics on AMO so that development builds can be supported there the same way as for the other extensions. As to Adblock Plus Unit Tests, the current consideration is to stop providing development builds here — developers who need to test their changes can usually create their own builds.

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