Since launching the Add-on Compatibility Reporter in October, we’ve received over 70,000 user reports on add-ons. That’s an incredible response, and it’s helping both Mozilla and developers identify add-ons that are working fine despite their compatibility information, and others that might actually have compatibility problems.
Some of the feedback we’ve received from add-on developers is that the reports are sometimes miscategorized or unhelpful. Unhelpful reports usually occur when a user doesn’t understand what they should be reporting. In miscategorized reports, the user might say the add-on has a problem, but in the comments types “works fine”.
One idea I’ve been exploring to improve the quality of the reports and make enabling incompatible add-ons safer is turning the reporter into a wizard. Instead of just enabling all incompatible add-ons at once and hoping the user goes to the Add-ons Manager to report on them, the wizard would enable each add-on one at a time and walk the user through submitting a report. After the user tests and submits the report, the browser would be restarted with the next add-on enabled for testing. A toolbar could be used to keep track of what add-on is currently being tested and to navigate the process:
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Friday’s Add-on-Con was a fitting finale to a very exciting week for browser add-ons. I said it last year and it was true again: I had a great time meeting so many people who care about add-ons and want to be involved in making them better for everyone.
My thanks goes to the organizers, especially Robert Reich and Fraser Kelton, for all of their work to make the conference happen. I think both sessions I was involved in (the marketplace keynote and Firefox Add-ons session) went well, as “reluctant” as some may feel I was.
It was exciting to see the increase in Google’s involvement this year with the beta launch of Chrome extensions last week. The conference was certainly more lively than I remember last year’s, where Mozilla had the only booth.
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An interesting article from TechCrunch was published this morning about Google Chrome’s new extensions platform. I’m very excited to see so much talk about add-ons recently, and Chrome’s extension support shows how important browser customization is.
I’ve been experimenting with Chrome extensions and plan on posting my thoughts on the experience soon, but the TechCrunch article caught me by surprise with some of its statements that I wanted to comment on sooner.
Most notable was the comparison of the Chrome extensions platform to Firefox’s current add-ons platform without a single mention of the Mozilla Labs Jetpack project. Jetpack is an experimentation into what the future of Firefox add-ons might look like using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These add-ons are installed without a browser restart, are automatically up-to-date, and also appear instantaneously in the Jetpack Gallery. And it’s very easy to write a useful Jetpack extension in just a couple minutes that even works on Mac.
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This Friday is Add-on-Con 2009, in its second year as the only conference dedicated to browser add-ons. It takes place at the Computer History Museum again in Mountain View, California, so I’m hoping the turnout is as good or better than last year. I was very excited when I first learned that Add-on-Con would happen again this year, as I had such a great time at last year’s event, despite having 0 hours of sleep the night before.
Mozilla will be participating heavily in the event again this year as a platinum sponsor and speaking at quite a few sessions:
If you’ll be in the Bay Area this week and are interested in add-ons, be sure to register for Add-on-Con before it’s too late! Even if you’re not going to Add-on-Con, don’t forget that we have an add-ons meetup at Mozilla HQ on Thursday night.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone for great add-on events on Thursday and Friday!
My blog’s third redesign has just launched with more @font-face and rgba() than you can shake an unsupported browser at.
My previous design with the squanda was about a year and a half old, but a few months ago it started to bother me. In recent weeks, it got to the point that I didn’t want to make any posts until I finished my new design.
I made the design from scratch with fancy new HTML 5 tags, which was super easy thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s guide to HTML 5. It focuses entirely on content rather than sidebar widgets, which is why the header is so plain and all the extras are relegated to the fat footer.
In addition to the new design, I took the opportunity to make use of some cool WordPress features I wasn’t before:
- comments are now disabled on posts after a year
- comment replies are enabled for better threading
- my posts use “more” tags now to keep things cleaner
I intend to start posting a lot more frequently, and already have a list of 7 posts that were waiting for the redesign to be unleashed.
I’m very interested in feedback on the new design, good or bad, so please leave comments here if you have any.
