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Ever since I started working with AMO in 2006, in addition to primarily working on the development of the site and Developer Tools, I’ve been interested and involved in the direction and administration of AMO and Firefox Add-ons in general. As of today, I’ve switched roles to follow my interests, and will be working with Basil on Add-ons Product Management instead of being a part of Mozilla Web Development. I’ll be working on a number of new projects and continuing to help AMO from a different perspective. I’ll also be helping out with community management until the AMO Community Manager position is filled.

I’ll be finishing up development of the AMO 3.5 Developer Tools Revamp milestone before I make myself forget CakePHP, but I’ve already started working on a couple of exciting new projects that I hope to share with everyone soon.

I’m looking forward to working with everyone in the coming months in my new role.

The AMO editors have been hard at work, reviewing 255 add-on updates and submissions in the 2 weeks before Firefox 3’s launch, and 238 updates/submissions between launch day (Tuesday) and Sunday.

There are currently 228 updates in the queue and 373 new nominated add-ons. There are normally about 10 new add-ons submitted to AMO every day, but since the release there have been 20-40 every day. Similarly, there are normally about 60-70 updates to existing add-ons every day, but since the launch there have been 100 - 150 every day.

Below is a graph of submission and update rates since 2004, hitting a peak of 235 updates on the day after release and 42 new submissions 2 days after release. You can also see a zoomed-in version of the graph. Astute observers will also notice a large increase in submissions in November 2006, when Firefox 2 was released.

Please be patient as our editors work through this backlog. You can read more about volunteering if you’d like to help.

A huge thanks to all of the editors who have donated their time and effort to make sure Firefox 3’s add-ons experience is great. Below is the list of editors with the number of reviews they’ve done since March 2007.

Add-on developers who log in to AMO and check their stats dashboard may be very happy to find that their active daily users have increased quite a bit this week (my own add-on reports a 46% increase since last week). I wanted to remind developers how we determine ADU and why it is slightly skewed this week.

By default, Firefox will check an add-on’s updateURL every 24 hours to look for an update. Add-ons that don’t have an updateURL specified default to AMO, which is how we determine how many “active daily users” an add-on has. The number of times an add-on’s GUID was pinged on AMO is approximately how many people were using that add-on that day.

In addition to the 24 hour checks, the same URL is pinged for several other reasons such as manually checking for updates, Firefox installations and upgrades, and installed add-on detection for Rock Your Firefox. Unfortunately, there’s not currently a way to differentiate these types of pings, so they are all counted as active daily users instead of only the scheduled pings. (see bug 392180)

So, this week’s large increase can be attributed to a couple things:

• Downloads - Most add-ons also had a huge increase in the number of downloads this week. My own add-on went from 3,000 downloads per day to hitting 16,000 on Wednesday. If your add-on’s install.rdf doesn’t say it’s compatible with the Firefox version installed, Firefox will ping AMO to see if there’s a new version or if this version actually is compatible. (This is how you can update your compatibility on AMO without uploading a new version.)
• Firefox 3 installations - When users upgrade Firefox to a new version of Firefox 2 or to Firefox 3, it will ping AMO for every extension installed to see if there’s a new maxVersion. After that, it displays a list of incompatible add-ons and offers the ability to check for new versions. (Thanks to Dave Townsend for researching this.)

Both of these will result in one or more additional update pings, as the compatibility will still be checked every 24 hours as usual.

And now, some aggregate statistics for your enjoyment:

Total downloads from AMO last Tuesday (6/10) and Wednesday (6/11): 932,072 + 985,229 = 1,917,301
Total downloads from AMO this Tuesday (6/17) and Wednesday (6/18): 2,454,024 + 4,472,336 = 6,926,360

Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons last Wednesday (6/11): 115,375,160
Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons this Wednesday (6/18): 141,233,285
(I expect Thursday’s ADU count is a good bit higher than Wednesday’s.)

With the release of AMO 3.4.3 tonight, there’s now a way to try out the new Developer Tools that I’ve been blogging about.

From the en-US Developer Tools, click on “Edit Add-on” next to one of your hosted add-ons. At the top of the edit page, you’ll see a box that offers a try-out of the new edit tools.

The following new tools are available:

• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Authors
• Edit Add-on: Manage Add-on Categories
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Descriptions
• Edit Add-on: Edit Add-on Properties
• Manage Versions and Files

The tools are accessible on preview.addons.mozilla.org as well, if you don’t want your changes to affect the production database.

If you find any bugs or have any feedback, please file a bug or add it to the wiki.

The next area of AMO Developer Tools being revamped is managing add-on versions and files. Here are some screenshots of the new look:

Listing of all versions:

Editing a specific version:

Changes/new features:

• Ability to delete “empty” versions that have no files
• Ability to add files to a specific version, not just the latest version
• Ability to add and remove target applications, where previously you could only change the minVersion and maxVersions of existing target applications.
• Documentation explaining what all the fields do
• Cleaner/better interface, allowing for future enhancements around versions and files

Feedback/Comments/Suggestions? Comment on this post or in the bug.

Previous post: Edit Add-on Properties

The new Edit Properties page of the AMO Developer Tools area is where the main settings of an add-on can be configured. The available fields on this new page are: Add-on Name, Default Locale, Add-on Icon, Homepage, Support Email Address and Website, and other add-on flags such as viewing the source online. These fields were previously mixed in the single edit add-on page.

Some screenshots of the new layout:

The only new field for this page is a flag for add-ons that contain binary components. The localizable Add-on Name, homepage, and support fields were previously on the Edit Descriptions page, but were moved here where they make more sense. One of the biggest wins of the new layout is the explanation of what each field does, consistent with the rest of the revamp.

If you have any feedback, please comment here or in the bug.

Previous post: Part 3, Manage Add-on Categories
Next post: Part 5, Manage Versions and Files

In last week’s part 2 preview of the upcoming changes to AMO’s Developer Tools area, I posted some screenshots of the new Edit Descriptions page. Before getting to the preview of the next page, I wanted to give some more information on AMO milestone 3.5’s schedule. After all of the sections of the new Edit Add-on area are finished, they’ll be pushed live to AMO where developers will have the option to try out the new edit pages rather than use the current one. This will give the new pages enough testing to make sure they’re ready to take over, while providing an alternative in case any major bugs are found. The current edit page will remain the default until 3.5 is officially launched after various other revamp pages and finished, localized, and tested.

Now, on to part 3: the Manage Add-on Categories page. This is what the Edit Categories experience currently is:

And this is the new version:

Notable changes include:

• Instead of one multi-select box with all categories for all supported applications, each supported application has its own box with a separate selection box for up to 3 categories.
• Validation was based on all categories and inconsistent, whereas now there is a hard limit of 3 categories per application.
• The Other/Miscellaneous category for each application was unregulated and many add-ons were in several normal categories in addition to the “Other” or “Miscellaneous” category. Now, an add-on can either be in 1-3 real categories or only the Other/Miscellaneous category.

As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment here. Thanks for reading!

Next, part 4: Edit Add-on Properties

Last week I blogged Part 1 of the previews of upcoming changes to the Developer Tools area of addons.mozilla.org. This week we’ll look at another new page in the revamp, now known as AMO milestone 3.5.

One UI element present on a number of pages in the Developer Tools area is the Translation Box. Anytime there’s a field that can be localized, this box appears to allow developers to switch text fields between locales. This is what the Translation Box currently looks like on the Edit Add-on page:

This is what the new Edit Add-on Descriptions page looks like:

The new Translation Box has a bunch of improvements:

• Documentation! The site currently has very little documentation about where fields are displayed and doesn’t have any explanation of what the Translation Box actually is. In the new site, every field has a description of what it is and where it is displayed, and a help section explains how translations work:
  
• Clearer understanding of translations with the idea of “adding” and “removing” translations rather than leaving untranslated fields blank.
   
• Sleek appearance. The translation boxes match the rest of the site, although some of the fields pictured may move to the Edit Add-on Properties page.
• Complete rewrite of backend code for retrieving and saving translations that will dramatically reduce the number of queries and processing required.
• Validation and errors - In the current site, localized fields can’t be properly validated, for example, limiting the summary to 250 characters. The new translation box handles maximum length detection nicely:
  

Closer to 3.5 we’ll have a staging area setup for testing these new tools, but until then, please post any feedback you have as comments here. Thanks!

Next, part 3: Manage Add-on Categories

As I neglected to announce 2 weeks ago, AMO 3.2 launched very smoothly (technically anyway - the cluster stayed up this time!)

For a few weeks before 3.2 launched, I’ve been working on a big project for an upcoming release of AMO: a rewrite of the Developer Tools area to make the user interface more intuitive and provide a number of new features to give developers greater control over many aspects of their add-on listings. I don’t have the work done so far on a staging server, but I’ll be blogging with screenshots as I finish various sections and asking for community feedback.

There are a number of big changes to the overall structure of how add-ons will be submitted, updated, and modified. The first few posts will focus on the new editing tools. Managing add-ons will be really simple and easy to figure out in the new design because the tools have been separated out into 6 different sections rather than one long, confusing page.

The first section I’d like to introduce and get feedback on is the Manage Add-on Authors page. It currently looks like this at the top of the Edit Add-on page:

The new page:

New features:

• Authors can now have 3 different roles: Owner, Developer, and Viewer
• Someone can be an author but not show up as one on the public page. For example, if a company has multiple people working on an add-on but only wants one to show up as the company name, the others can be hidden.
• The display order of authors can now be specified, so a developer who does 90% of the work can be listed first rather than by name or user id. (bug 291629)

If you’re an add-on developer, please take a look at the screenshot and comment with any feedback.

Thanks!

Next, Part 2: Edit Add-on Descriptions

Yesterday, Mike announced the public preview of the upcoming changes to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). One of the new features that has been long-requested is the ability for developers to see how many update pings, or Active Daily Users, their add-ons have. Just like Firefox, extensions check for updates once a day, and we count how many times this happens for each extension. While the total number of downloads tells add-on authors about how many people have tried out their extension, the active daily user count tells them about how many people used it on a given day, although it’s not perfect.

There’s a bit of fine print regarding active daily usage, but some of the more important points are:

• Only add-ons that do not have an updateURL specified are counted. All add-ons are required to have an empty updateURL when submitted to AMO. If an add-on is distributed from another website with an updateURL, those pings are not counted by us.
• Active Daily Users is not the same as saying “this many people use my extension”. Not all extension users use Firefox every day of the week, users can manually check for updates which will count false active users, etc.
• Many people keep extensions installed but disabled. The stats dashboard allows you to see the various statuses, such as enabled, disabled, incompatible, etc.

Now that some background information is out of the way, on to the features!

Summary Graph and Table

The first thing you’ll see in the stats dashboard is a summary graph that shows the downloads per day and active daily users for the last 2 weeks. Active daily users are currently only counted on Wednesdays, but will switch to every day in the future when we change around the back-end processing. Below the graph is a summary table that shows download information on the left and active daily user information on the right.

Customizable Graphs

The plot selector dropdown in the top left allows you to choose a graph to display: Downloads, Active Daily Users, or Active Daily Users broken down by Add-on Version, Application, Add-on Status, or Operating System. Downloads and Active Daily Users will give a historical graph since July 2007 (or later if your add-on is newer). The ADU breakdown graphs will sort the values by total count and plot the top 6 so that the graph isn’t horribly cluttered. You can use these plot dropdowns to change any of the plots to another value, or even use the options menu at the right to add more plots.

All of these graphs have Firefox and add-on events layered on them so that you can see where the release of a new Firefox or add-on version might have influenced download or ADU numbers. The options menu also allows you to make the graph larger and view the CSV file of the data used in the graph.

RSS

There’s now an RSS feed of the Statistics Summary box updated every day with the latest download and active daily user totals.

Public vs. Private

By changing the settings of their dashboard, add-on authors can designate their statistics as public or private. All dashboards are private by default, meaning only the add-on authors and Mozilla can see the statistics, with the exception of Total Downloads. The number of total downloads was displayed publicly prior to March 2006, and with the upcoming changes will once again be displayed on the add-on’s display page. Active Daily Users and the detailed breakdowns, however, have never been public before and are only part of the dashboard. If the dashboard is set to public, a link will appear on the add-on’s display page to view the statistics, and anyone browsing the statistics index will see a list of all public stats add-ons to view.

I’ve marked one of my add-ons as public, so feel free to take a look at the dashboard yourself. (You don’t even have to log in!)

Known Issues

There are number of known issues filed and a number of known issues in my head for which I haven’t yet filed bugs. Some of the more annoying issues are actually Timeplot (graphing library) bugs that we’ll work on fixing, such as the value popups overlapping and being hard to identify with a plot. I’m also planning on adding a good bit of documentation to the stats dashboard so that you don’t have to read this blog post to understand how everything works.

Feedback

Feedback on the Stats Dashboard can go to the feedback wiki, or for specific bugs and features, please file a bug.