Earlier this year (in Firefox 32), we landed a fix for bug 760356 , to reduce how often we delay starting up the browser in order to check whether all your add-ons are compatible. We landed the related bug 1010449 in Firefox 31 to gather telemetry about the compatibility check, so that we could to before/after analysis.
When you upgrade to a new version of Firefox, changes to the core browser can break add-ons. For this reason, every add-on comes with metadata that says which versions of Firefox it works with. There are a couple of straightforward cases, and quite a few tricky corners…
We want to keep as many add-ons as possible enabled, because our users love (most of) their add-ons, while protecting users from incompatible add-ons that break Firefox. To do this, we implemented a very conservative check every time you update to a new version. On the first run with a new Firefox version, before we load any add-ons we ask addons.mozilla.org *and* each add-on’s update server whether there is a metadata update available, and whether there is a newer version of the add-on compatible with the