Having a good experience when testing Firefox Nightly builds should be self-evident. Therefor the QA Automation Services team is maintaining the Nightly Tester Tools extension, which brings a couple of useful features to ease the testing efforts.
While the extension works fine most of the time, we unfortunately fail at times when a version bump for Firefox happens. Exactly this action repeats in a 6 week interval and is the release cycle of Firefox.
So what happens here? The extension registers binary components for the crashme feature in the manifest file and that’s why it is not handled as a ‘compatible by default’ extension by the add-ons manager. So right after a version bump the extension gets marked as incompatible until the compatibility information on addons.mozilla.org has been updated. This results in an unavailability of the extension in Nightly builds for a couple of hours or even a day, depending on when one of us has time to actually do the version bump. That had to be changed, and thankfully Szabolcs Hubai has spent some time on it to fix the problem and to make our extension ‘compatible by default’. From now on you will never see the Nightly Tester Tools disabled after a version bump of Firefox, which is great. I hope you all will enjoy it!
With the 3.3 release we also ship some other fixes which you can read about in the changelog.
You want to help in the development of the extension? Feel free to contact us as usual via MozIRC or our mailing list.