Mozilla ask add on developers to improve code

Mozilla have announced a crackdown on slow Firefox addons. In a recent blog post, Justin Scott, Add on product manager described the measures the organisation will take to minimise the slowdowns.

“We’ve updated our Performance Best Practices and have begun reaching out to developers of slow add-ons and asking them to work on performance”. According to the blog post, each add on you install can increase the load time of the browser by an average of 10 percent. Some obviously are slower than others.

Mozilla are kicking off the new scheme by benchmarking add ons from the top 100 list to see how they affect the browser start up time. The results are shown over here.

The list of these scanned files will soon extend to every new version of the add on, so sloppy coders will be exposed pretty quickly. Mozilla will even be publishing benchmark figures such as page load time at a later date. Warnings will be added for those that increase start up time by 25 percent of more.

KitGuru says: If you have any of the ‘top ten slowest' installed, it might be worth waiting for a new version to be released.

Become a Patron!