How many add-ons are there?

It’s a question I’m asked fairly often, and my response is usually “it depends”. addons.mozilla.org (AMO) is a pretty complex system, so answering a simple question like “how many add-ons are there?” isn’t so easy when you consider that there are 7 types of add-ons, different status levels, and several supported applications. And of course, not all add-ons are hosted on AMO. My answer to that question to someone looking for consumer-friendly Thunderbird add-ons would differ by thousands from my answer to a web developer who wants to extend Firefox to its fullest.

A few weeks ago I had the idea of a self-service chart that I could point people to when they ask me this question, and here it is.

(I strongly recommend viewing this table on my blog.)

Add-ons hosted on AMO (June 12, 2009)

Status

All Active Active Public

Add-on Type

All 10936 8661 3531 All

Application

9140 7640 3061 Firefox
978 848 543 Thunderbird
Extensions + Themes 10046 8021 3271 All
8946 7479 2965 Firefox
843 737 469 Thunderbird
Extensions 8937 7248 2803 All
8065 6792 2567 Firefox
746 664 407 Thunderbird

Some explanations:

  • The status row is made up of 3 columns: All (every single add-on in the database), Active (neither user-disabled, admin-disabled, nor “incomplete”), and Active Public (active and the add-on has “public” status, meaning it has been reviewed by AMO Editors)
  • The add-on type column is made up of 3 rows: All (every add-on type: extensions, themes, dictionaries, search plugins, language packs, plugins), Extensions + Themes (only extensions and themes are counted), and Extensions (only extensions are counted)
  • The application column is made up of 3 rows: All (every application AMO supports: Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, SeaMonkey, Fennec), Firefox, and Thunderbird. Keep in mind that some add-ons are compatible with multiple applications.

I didn’t want to make the table even more confusing, but if you’re interested in other applications: 324 active SeaMonkey add-ons, 99 active Sunbird add-ons, and 33 active Fennec add-ons. And other add-on types: 119 active dictionaries, 470 active search plugins, and 51 active language packs.

Please don’t ask me to break this down by Firefox 3.5 compatibility — I think my <table> might explode.

1 comment

AndyEd

There are some great tools for visualizing datasets like this (including 3.5 compat). I’m working with the places team to produce sharable scripts for analyzing, cleaning, and visualizing the places stats project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Places/Stats).

We’re using R for data import, munging, and stats and I’m learning GGobi for viz. I just did a very exciting screencast for producing “matrix scatterplots” with GGobi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIkuQFQLMeo

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