(Or why I removed my extension from Mozilla addons site )

In 2004 I decided to play with the possibilities of Thunderbird addon. I started to write the "virtual identity extension" and immediately published version 0.1. From version 0.2.1 on, Which was published in November 2004, virtual identity was available on mozilla.org .

From 2004 up to 2011 I continued developing this extension, and always tried to get this extension published on addons.mozilla.org. Users of the Mozilla mail programs Thunderbird and Seamonkey had been able to find my Therefore extension just by the search included the main features or addon sites. Over the years I got around 4000 (?) Permanent (?) Users worldwide of this extension, and publishing at the official mozilla site was one reason for getting people pointed to my work.

But over the years there had been more and more restrictions at addons.mozilla.org, and I finally decided in August 2011 that I will stop my cooperation with addons.mozilla.org by removing all of my releases from their site. There are a lot of reasons, and I got asked to declare them in more detail ...

  • My software started as a hack to Fulfil some personal requirements. The virtual identity extension is still a hack, everybody who has a look at the code wants to sign this.
    Because it's no bug-free software, my typical release cycle is the following: I want to add some features or changes for compatibility with new Thunderbird / Seamonkey releases, and publish the resulting version. Once I publish some new version, I often get a bunch of bug-reports which i can easily fix with small code changes, and some follow-up Rapidly-versions will be released.
    The problem is, that addons.mozilla.org requires a code-review of my extension before it gets published. Even if my addon Fulfills all the requirements of this review, it will take time (and manpower) to get this done. Therefore it might take a week or two before any bugfix can be released.
    That's why I published my parallel extension on my own website. There I was able to fix bugs immediately, Which made the development process seen from addons.mozilla.orgs site only worse. If I uploaded another version to addons.mozilla.org while some previous version was still in their review process, I just moved my extension again at the end of the waiting-cue for a review. If I did not uploaded it to mozilla.org, the reviewer told me that it makes no sense to review some old version (he saw the new version at my own site), right ...
    However, what addons.mozilla.org mostly to slow to get my bug fixes released in short time. And it's a pity not being able to publish a bugfix immediately, seeing people downloading a broken version and getting reports about bugs already fixed.
  • The review process got more restricted with the time and now includes some more tests to improve the standards of the extensions at addons.mozilla.org. Which sounds good at the first place, just turned out to be the showstopper for me.
    After a year of quietness I continued to develop virtual identity in the more intense this summer. While releasing the software at addons.mozilla.org, I got told that I should take care about some namespace pollution , which happened with my extension.
    The coding-to Fulfil the requirements had been changed mozilla standards since last year, and therefore I decided to write a new version of the extension for up-to-date Thunderbird and Seamonkey releases Which takes care critizised on the issues. Mayor code changes had been required and I expected the new release to require a while till it would be as stable as the old one.
    I decided to do the work on a new brunch and started with the 0.8-line of virtual identity. But I was not able to release this work and publish the changes step by step, because they had been required to Fulfil all together improved the coding standards of addons.mozilla.org.
    And the old version 0.7 was still around for users with older versions Firefox and Thunderbird, and even if it was stable, there had been small bug fixes and feature implementations since than. But I was Prevented from addons.mozilla.org to publish these fixes and changes at their site - because of the overall code changes required.

That's enough. It's not me who is doing the programming work, Therefore it should be me who is the One Who Decides if there should be an update for one of my releases or. I like to decide what to release and when [1]. mozilla.org might give me some credits on how my software is useful or not, but I never want to give them more power or anybody else then myself over the release process of my work again.

[1] even the release time can be a problem. I remember this one time, when addons.mozilla.org just finished the review at the beginning of my holiday. No Internet for me, no support for the users - I would have used a better timing on my own.

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