In August we announced that work had begun on the WebExtensions API as the future of developing add-ons in Firefox. This post covers the progress we’ve made since then.

WebExtensions is currently in an alpha state, so while this is a great time to get involved, please keep in mind that things might change if you decide to use it in its current state. Since August, we’ve closed 77 bugs and ramped up the WebExtensions team at Mozilla. With the release of Firefox 45 in March 2016, we’ll have full support for the following APIs: alarms, contextMenus, pageAction and browserAction. Plus a bunch of partially supported APIs: bookmarks, cookies, extension, i18n, notifications, runtime, storage, tabs, webNavigation, webRequest, windows.

A full list of the API differences is available, and you can also follow along on the state of WebExtensions on arewewebextensionsyet.com. All add-ons built with WebExtensions are fully compatible with a multiprocess Firefox and will work in Chrome and Opera.

Beyond APIs, support is being added to addons.mozilla.org to enable developers to upload their add-ons and have them tested, that should be ready for Firefox 44. Documentation is being worked on in MDN and a set of example WebExtensions is available.

Over the coming months we will work our way towards a beta in Firefox 47 and the first stable release in Firefox 48. If you’d like to jump in to help, or get your API added, then please join us on our mailing list or at one of our public meetings.

Your contributions are appreciated!