Labs/Jetpack/Release Notes/1.7
Contents
About
The Add-on SDK is a software development kit that provides a set of tools and APIs for building, testing, and packaging Firefox add-ons.
Installation
Obtain the SDK in your favorite compression format:
Then unpack the archive, open the addon-sdk-1.7/README.txt file, and follow its instructions.
Major Changes Since 1.6
Localization Plural Forms
We've added full support for different plural forms.
CSS Injection
We've added contentStyle and contentStyleFile options to page-mod, enabling you to inject CSS into a web page.
Implementation of 'Promise Abstractions'
Promises provide an interface for interacting with an object that represents the result of an action that is performed asynchronously, and may or may not be finished at any given point in time. In the Add-on SDK, we follow the CommonJS Promise Implementation.
See the documentation for the new promise module.
Note that this is a low-level API, so might change in future SDK releases.
contentURL property of panel and page-worker is made configurable
This means you can change the content loaded into a panel or page-worker, without having to create a new object. See the panel documentation.
Major Bug Fixes
In the SDK's new localization system, multiple strings in the .properties files are broken.
This bug asks that 'Specifying "dependencies" in package.json should be additive, not destructive.' It's been marked WONTFIX because packages are to be deprecated in some future release.
Known Issues
See the complete list of known issues and requests for enhancement. We've listed some of the issues you're most likely to encounter separately below.
Use of the browserWindowIterator method can sometimes attempt to access the DOM while the document it still loading, before it is ready. The symptom of this would be a window that is blank or partially working. This may affect add-ons which use the Widget, Windows or Tabs APIs, since these APIs use browserWindowIterator internally.
Use of the deprecated global postMessage() function in a content script will give the error "ReferenceError: console is not defined".
console.log() calls from a script included in a panel's HTML (as in this example: https://builder.addons.mozilla.org/addon/1042246/latest/) don't work: nothing is logged, either to the terminal console or the web console.
Some keyboard events are fired twice on some elements inside a panel.
Selection Context Menu Item throws error on right-click of form button.
Specified panel width ignored when Firefox is maximized.
Items of context-menu module appear only after successful page load. While the page is still loading they don't appear.
This behavior is by design because the worker for an item-window pair is created when the window finishes loading. Until a worker is created, context-menu can't tell whether the item should be shown or not, so the item isn't shown until the worker is created.
If context-menu supported contentScriptWhen like page-mod does, this could probably be done by setting it to "start". Right now consumers are effectively locked in to "ready".
Access to Full Screen API blocked from context-menu API.
passwords.search() function "crashes" with some profiles.
If you change location in a content script using:
window.location="http://mozilla.org";
Nothing happens, instead, `location` attribute is just replaced by a string.
If a page-mod matches a page, its content scripts get attached to every iframe in the page, and this can have a bad effect on performance if the script is large and the page contains many iframes.
Although this behaviour is intentional, there should be an option to make content scripts only run on the topmost frame of a page.
When an html select element (e.g. a drop-down menu) in web content inside a panel has focus, clicking *outside* the panel does not close the panel.
If you create a context menu item for the selection type, and right-click a form button, the context menu does not appear and an error is logged. It's not yet clear whether this is specific to form buttons or not.
The tab array is not reordered to match the on-screen order of the tabs after a tab move event takes place.
The SDK will give an error if your package name contains spaces or Unicode characters.
If your add-on stores data using the simple-storage API, the data is not cleaned up when your add-on is uninstalled.
Some core JavaScript functions, such as btoa(), are not available to add-on code. This is now being tracked in a Feature Page.
If an add-on is uninstalled while it's disabled, it's not notified of uninstall. If the add-on needs to do some special cleanup on uninstall, like removing persistent storage such as a file, this won't be possible if it has been disabled.
By default, widgets are placed on the add-on bar, and given a height to match the height of that bar. If the user moves the widget to a different toolbar, and that toolbar has a different height, the widget's height is not updated accordingly.
A widget containing HTML content gets no icon in the Customize Toolbar Window.
When a user removes a widget from the toolbar its detach event does not get sent.
Selection events for a page are not sent if the page did not fully load (for example, because the user stopped the page loading).
If you have copy of mozrunner installed on your system, the cfx test command may not work correctly.
There is a workaround for this.
Feedback and Bug Reports
We'd love to hear any feedback you have regarding this release! You can post it to the discussion group or report a bug.
