Back in November, Wil Clouser posted about some substantial changes to AMO’s codebase and development process in 2010, most notably switching from the CakePHP framework that we’ve been developing on since mid-2006 to Django, a Python framework. Those of you who have become accustomed to seeing an AMO release announcement every 3 weeks with cool new features may be wondering what we’ve been up to the last 2 months.
Our development team has been hard at work building up the Django framework to be able to interact with the existing database and read CakePHP’s sessions so that we can have both sites up in production at the same time. Once this is finished, they’ll begin porting over sections of the site to the new codebase, and ideally users won’t even realize that some parts of the site they’re using are powered by the new system.
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As content on the web becomes more personalized, just about every website asks you to create an account and log in for a better experience. You probably click on “Log in” links and buttons several times a day without much regard for their presentation. That means you might not see anything wrong with this picture:
But there is something wrong with that picture: login is not a verb. A link or button that says “login” is like a search field with a submit button labelled “Terms” — it’s not an action.
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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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