950349 - Breaking changes are not listed in the release notes.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(www.mozilla.org :: Pages & Content, defect)

Description

[Robert Zenz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131115105824

Steps to reproduce:

With the release of 26, the old download manager was completely removed, previously this manager was accessible and could be activated with the option `browser.download.useToolkitUI`. Multiple addons relied on this functionality, with the removable these addons stopped working. Additionally, many users choose to use the old download manager instead of the new one (and set said option to true).

The release notes (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/26.0/releasenotes/) do not contain *any* information on the removal of this functionality and possible breakage of addons.


Actual results:

There is no information in the release notes that addons might break or functionality was removed, leaving users confused.


Expected results:

The release notes should contain a simple note that the old download manager was completely removed and addons relying on it will stop working with this release.

Comment 1

[Kohei Yoshino]

Add-on developers should subscribe the Add-ons Blog for the latest updates. Here are the compatibility posts:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2013/03/20/compatibility-for-firefox-20/
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2013/11/27/compatibility-for-firefox-26/

I believe the same principle applies to site compatibility changes. The docs I have compiled are always available on MDN:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/tag/FxSiteCompat

Comment 2

[Kohei Yoshino]

... and not all feature-breakage changes will be on the release notes.

Comment 3

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

You can also add yourself to the announce-compatibility list: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/announce-compatibility