Labs/Jetpack/Release Notes/1.8
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-1.8/README.txt file, and follow its instructions.
Major Changes Since 1.7
Localization of HTML
We've added support for localizing HTML: see the localization guide.
contentScriptOptions
We've added the ability to configure content scripts with a set of read-only options. See the content script documentation, as well as the API documentation for content modules such as page-mod.
Low-level "heritage" module
We've added a new low-level module, heritage, to help implement inheritance.
Note that this is a low-level API, so might change in future SDK releases.
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.
Content scripts are only destroyed/detached when the matched document is removed from the bfcache, so that it will still be alive and working if we get back to this document. (And it won't be created twice: once on page loading, and another time when we browse back to this document in history).
This choice introduce a quite important issue. When the user goes back or forth in history, the content script will still "work" on websites that don't necessary match page-mod rules. Meaning that the script can still fire timeouts, interval, messages, events and eventually listen to some DOM events.
Yet another leak has been identified on context-menu on addon disabling. We are leaking all modules when a module is using `Item` class from context-menu.
No actual web content is leaked, only the modules, and only when the add-on is disabled.
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.
