Developers got their first glimpse at detailed statistics for their add-ons in early 2008 when we launched the Developer Statistics Dashboard for every add-on hosted on AMO. Since then, we’ve made incremental improvements to this tool, such as adding grouping and comparison options, data tables, locale usage stats, contributions, and most recently download sources.
In July, we asked developers to take a survey about how they use the Statistics Dashboard, and as part of our AMO rewrite currently underway, we’ll be revamping the dashboard.
Here’s a mockup from our designer, Chris Howse, of the overview page of the new dashboard:
read the rest of this entry »
We announced download source tracking for add-ons hosted on AMO in November, and since then have made a few improvements across the site. We reduced the number of unknown sources by half, from 22% to 11%, by scouring the site to find edge cases where tracking codes weren’t being applied. Now, every install button on the site should have a tracking code.
We’ve also added several new codes, such as on mozilla.com’s Firefox Customization page. It’s exciting to see that many add-ons have adopted the external source tracking feature to track downloads from their websites and marketing campaigns, and those downloads now make up 2% of the total.
Here’s an updated pie chart showing the source distribution of the 2.1 million downloads last Friday, the day after Firefox 3.6’s launch.
read the rest of this entry »
While looking into the performance of our category pages on AMO for the upcoming Zamboni revamp, I realized we’ve never talked about which categories and browse pages are the most popular. Listed below are the top 15 browse pages by daily pageviews.
read the rest of this entry »
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.
read the rest of this entry »
Rock Your Firefox was a Facebook application we built two years ago to add a fun, social aspect to Firefox customization. As your friends selected their favorite add-ons, you could see what add-ons were popular with people you know, and get recommendations based on those favorites.
Last year I blogged that we were no longer actively developing or fixing bugs with the application behind Rock Your Firefox, a part of AMO’s codebase. Sadly, we’ll be ending support and disabling Rock Your Firefox this Friday. We may re-launch again in the future when we can rewrite the application to fix numerous bugs and make use of many new features on both AMO and the Facebook Platform.
As a way to remember the good times you had with Rock Your Firefox, make sure to grab a Rock Your Firefox Wallpaper before it’s too late.