I lead the add-ons team at Mozilla. Add-on compatibility was definitely a big consideration in our plans to switch to a faster release cycle, and we're working on proposing some changes to the way it works. As you mention, the current way of doing things won't work 4 times a year.
These changes will probably include automatic compatibility with certain major versions. We'll have more to share soon on the add-ons blog.
forgive me if i'm wrong, but i couldn't help but feel like the documentation for upgrading addons from 3 to 4 was extremely scarce and scattered. i pieced together several documents from MDC, the developer forum, and the Mozilla blog, and still couldn't get a full view of the changes that affected my addon.
revisiting the submission process itself is welcome and seemingly necessary; but i'd be willing to deal with an inefficient submission process if the upgrade was well documented.
Personally, I think that the compatibility should be based on feature versions. If an addon says "I use version x of feature y", and that feature doesn't get touched for 20 versions, it would be automatically compatible.
I lead the add-ons team at Mozilla. Add-on compatibility was definitely a big consideration in our plans to switch to a faster release cycle, and we're working on proposing some changes to the way it works. As you mention, the current way of doing things won't work 4 times a year.
These changes will probably include automatic compatibility with certain major versions. We'll have more to share soon on the add-ons blog.