Per-Window Private Browsing changes

[Jeff Griffiths]

Rocketeers!

Erik Vold ( with help from the rest of the team! ) has been working
hard to implement support for Per-Window Private Browsing in the SDK,
and he posted a summary of the work and how it will impact add-on
authors yesterday. I encourage you to read this post:

http://work.erikvold.com/jetpack/2013/01/30/per-window-private-browsing.html

If you are maintaining an SDK-based add-on, here is our best advice in
order to ensure that your add-on keeps working as expected over the
next couple of Firefox versions:

1. Re-pack your existing add-on to SDK 1.13, released yesterday and
re-submit it to AMO. This will immunize you from an upcoming change in
Firefox 21 that will remove the oldd Global Private browsing service
completely. Unless you take this initial step, users will not be able
to use your add-on with Firefox 21.

2. Once SDK 1.14 is released on March 12th, re-pack your add-on again
to SDK 1.14. This will allow you to specify whether your add-on will
be active in Private Browsing windows, and the default will be
‘inactive’.

The SDK team will be working with AMO to mitigate the impact of these
changes in a number of ways:

* We will be reaching out to the community via posts like this and
encouraging people to re-pack their add-ons.
* We will continue to identify add-ons on AMO that use very old and/or
dangerous add-ons and marking them incompatible with newer versions of
Firefox.
* We will be re-visiting our re-packing scripts that can potentially
re-pack large numbers of simple add-ons. I’ll report back in a few
weeks with the specifics of this work.

I'd be happy to field any questions you have about these issues.

regards, Jeff