About three and a half years ago (I recall it happening at the 2008 summit in Whistler), Rob Strong handed ownership of the add-ons manager over to me. I had already been very involved in working on the module so I was really excited to have something to call my own and be responsible for. It’s been a great few years with many fun bugs and new features culminating with the complete redesign that we did for Firefox 4 and the third party blocking features in Firefox 8, but times have changed. I now have more responsibilities on my plate (like managing the awesome Add-ons SDK engineers) and to be honest I think it’s probably a bad idea to have such a fundamental feature of Firefox to be under the control of just one person for so long. So I’m delighted to say that Blair McBride has agreed to take over as module owner.

Blair has been integral to the add-ons manager work since Firefox 4 where he wrote all the UI parts of the redesign from scratch. Most recently he knocked it out of the park with the default to compatible feature that is in beta builds now. That was a large hairy project involving multiple teams that Blair basically ran as the lead engineer with no real help from me. Since then he’s proven to be keen on moving the add-ons manager forwards in ways that I wish I still had the time for so I’m sure that I’m leaving the module in safe hands. I still really care about the add-ons manager so I know I’ll continue to be active in reviews, bug reports and discussions (hopefully Blair won’t have to tell me to shut up too many times ;)) but I look forward to seeing where Blair takes things now.