Nightly Tester Tools Update
Posted: December 2, 2010 Filed under: mozilla, mozqa 3 Comments »Nightly Tester Tools 3.0 has been released, containing some new features. Among the added features are Crashme functionality, copying about:support to pastebin, and viewing the pushlog of changes since the last nightly.
Since the update about the future of Nightly Tester Tools, there’s been some discussion around the addon compatibility feature. We decided to take out addon compatibility fixing for individual addons, but left in a checkbox that overrides compatibility checking for all addons. It works in the same way Addon Compatibility Reporter does, but everyone’s encouraged to install ACR to help report compatibility issues to addon authors.
Mobile version
Aakash has been working on a mobile version of NTT, with a few of of the same features of the desktop version and a few mobile-specific ones. Nightly Tester Tools 3.0 for mobile has also been released.
You can request a feature by filing an NTT bug. Check out the code on Github (mobile code here).
>we decided to take out the advanced addon compatibility fixing (you can no longer change the compatibility of individual addons)
WTF?
I mean why would you do that? Just to be difficult?
This smacks of the worst elitism.
We took it out because platform changes made it difficult to implement, it hasn’t been working since Firefox 3.6. You can still change compatibility checking for all addons though, which is usually the level of control people want.
Thanks for taking on updating this extension. I use it quite a bit and appreciate your work to keep it current.
I agree, though, that it seems strange to allow changing compatibility for all addons, as opposed to individual addons. I understand that you can basically achieve the same thing (skipping version compatibility checks on addons) by making a change to the config settings on Firefox. Can you elaborate about the advantage to building this functionality into Nightly Tester Tools? How would the NTT functionality be different from changing the config settings in Firefox?
I use the “force install” feature to selectively install a few particular addons that had gone out of development entirely (like Google Notebook) so as to avoid the operational issues that can come with forced installation. The best feature of Nightly Tester Tools, imho – and one that makes it broadly popular, even among non-developer audiences.