Over time Mozilla has been trying to reduce the amount of time between developing a feature and getting it into a user’s hands. Some time ago we would do around one feature release of Firefox every year, more recently we’ve moved to doing one feature release every six weeks. But it still takes at least 12 weeks for a feature to get to users. In some cases we can speed that up by landing new things directly on the beta/aurora branches but the more we do this the harder it is for release managers to track the risk of shipping a given release.

The Go Faster project is investigating ways that we can speed up getting changes to users. System add-ons are one piece of this that will let us deliver updates to core Firefox features more often than the regular six week releases. Instead of being embedded in the rest of the code certain features will be developed as standalone system add-ons.

Building features as add-ons gives us more flexibility in how we deliver the features to users. System add-ons will ship in two different ways. First every Firefox release will include a default set of system add-ons. These are the latest versions of the features at the time the Firefox build was produced. Later during runtime Firefox will contact Mozilla’s update servers to ask for the current list of system add-ons. If there are new or updated versions listed Firefox will download and install them giving users access to the newest features without needing to update the entire application.

Building a feature as an add-on gives developers a lot of benefits too. Developers will be able to work on and test new features without doing custom Firefox builds. Users can even try out new features by just installing the add-ons. Once the feature is ready to ship it ships as an add-on with no code changes necessary for integration into Firefox. This is something we’ve attempted to do before with things like Test Pilot and pdf.js, but system add-ons make this process much smoother and reduces the differences between how the feature runs as an add-on and how it runs when shipped in the application.

The basic support for system add-ons is already included in current nightly builds and Firefox 44 should be the first release that we could use to deliver features like this if we choose. If you’re interested in the details you can read the client implementation plan or follow along the tracking bug for the client side of the feature.