A little more than a year ago we started talking about where add-ons were headed, and what the future would look like. It’s been busy, and we wanted to give everyone an update as well as provide guidance on what to expect in 2017.

Over the last year, we’ve focused as a community on foundational work building out WebExtensions support in Firefox and addons.mozilla.org (AMO), reducing the time it takes for listed add-ons to be reviewed while maintaining the standards we apply to them, and getting Add-ons ready for e10s. We’ve made a number of changes to our process and products to make it easier to submit, distribute, and discover add-ons through initiatives like the signing API and a revamped Discovery Pane in the add-ons manager. Finally, we’ve continued to focus on communicating changes to the developer community via direct outreach, mailing lists, email campaigns, wikis, and the add-ons blog.

As we’ve mentioned, WebExtensions are the future of add-ons for Firefox, and will continue to be where we concentrate efforts in 2017. WebExtensions are decoupled from the platform, so the changes we’ll make to Firefox in the coming year and beyond won’t affect them. They’re easier to develop, and you won’t have to learn about Firefox internals to get up and running. It’ll be easier to move your add-ons over to and from other browsers with minimal changes, as we’re making the APIs compatible – where it makes sense – with products like Opera, Chrome, and Edge.

By the end of 2017, and with the release of Firefox 57, we’ll move to WebExtensions exclusively, and will stop loading any other extension types on desktop. To help ensure any new extensions work beyond the end of 2017, AMO will stop accepting any new extensions for signing that are not WebExtensions in Firefox 53. Throughout the year we’ll expand the set of APIs available, add capabilities to Firefox that don’t yet exist in other browsers, and put more WebExtensions in front of users.

There’s a lot of moving parts, and we’ll be tracking more detailed information – including a timeline and roadmap – on the WebExtensions section of the Mozilla Wiki. If you’re interested in getting involved with the add-on community and WebExtensions, we have a few ways you can do that. We’re looking forward to the next year, and will continue to post updates and additional information here on the Add-ons blog.

For more information on Add-ons and WebExtensions, see:

Note: Edited to better identify specifics around Firefox 53