Nobody’s Perfect

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:35:56 +0000

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.

As Chrome’s extension support is in beta, I think using our experimental Jetpack platform as the point of comparison would have been fairer.

I was also surprised to see the Chrome extensions gallery characterized as “much more open” with the recent news that Google is rejecting extensions that, in its opinion, take browser customization a bit too far on its properties. Being open is a pretty big deal to Mozilla, so it’s disappointing to see the TechCrunch author feels we lost on that one. The Download Squad article takes a different view on Chrome extensions:

Unlike Mozilla’s add-on site for Firefox, it appears as though things are going to run in a slightly more Apple-esque fashion.
— Lee Matthews, Download SquadDecember 4, 2009

This has been an incredible week for the add-on development world with the launch of the Chrome extensions gallery on Tuesday, their event on Wednesday, our meetup at Mozilla tonight, and Add-on-Con tomorrow. I’m glad that the Chrome team learned from the existing Firefox add-ons platform and made many of the same improvements we have with Jetpack, and I look forward to seeing where the two of us take the next generation of add-ons, because no one has “perfected browser extensions”.

ChromeExtensions.org: sincerely flattering

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:36:12 +0000

As a kid, I was pretty good at the comics where two pictures were placed side-by-side and you were tasked with figuring out the slight differences between them. I came across ChromeExtensions.org today, a website for Google Chrome browser extensions that isn’t officially connected with Google. I noticed quite a few similarities between this site and a site I’ve worked on for a few years, addons.mozilla.org. I really do take it as a compliment that they liked our site enough to copy so much of it, but in the interest of fun, I’ll try to identify as many coincidences as I can.

Homepage Promo Box

Perhaps the most obvious similarity is the promotion box at the top of the page with 3 extensions in each panel that rotates between tabs at the bottom. On AMO, this box is powered by featured collections of add-ons, but ChromeExtensions.org uses normal categories. Amusingly, their version of the “Like these?” text underneath still references collections although they don’t support collections (yet?).

Category Names

Many of their categories are lifted right from AMO, like “Alerts & Updates” and “Social & Communication”. Others were combined, or words re-arranged.

Homepage Browse Tabs and Add-on Browse Layout

In addition to the same sort/filter tabs, the layout of the add-on’s icon, name, author, and install button is pretty familiar.

Add-on Metadata

User Profiles

Collections Logo

I especially like that their icon is named “collections.gif”.

Footer

ChromeExtensions.org, if you have any questions on implementing anything, we have our weekly AMO meetings on Wednesdays at 10am.

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