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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, add-ons are updated more slowly than their Chrome counterparts because Mozilla actually reviews the code of each add-on offered from their store to attempt to validate it's not doing anything naughty. Google and Apple make these types of promises, but really they approve things after a cursory glance and then respond to any user complaints that may come in.

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Which is really what Firefox needs to do as well. This is one of my main pain points as a Firefox Extension developer and a turn off for most I know. Rather than keeping people wait for 15 or so days for approving their add-ons, they should rather improve their automatic code checking tools as much as they can, and stop at that (and have a better extension flagging system).

The problem with current system is more if our add-ons are based on a specific website like mine. When that website changes, it breaks my add-on and I upload the fix immediately. But Firefox takes days to approve it, making my add-on look bad in public.

On the other hand I read that the review process is quite slow (as in painfully slow)

Yeah, this is the tradeoff. It takes a long time to audit code. Supposedly Mozilla is doing this every time an add-on update is sent for review. Google and Apple just pretend like they do, and I guess Mozilla didn't get the memo that you're supposed to pretend.

Yes, FF/Mozilla trying to be perfect delay lots of things. They should ship fast, fix later (and not be perfectionists).

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