It’s where add-ons can be installed, disabled, removed, searched, and oftentimes tweaked. It’s used quite a lot, and is how many Firefox users discover the existence of add-ons. It has largely remained the same for a number of years, with the addition of the “Get Add-ons” pane in Firefox 3 that shows several recommended add-ons and allows for searching the Firefox Add-ons gallery for new add-ons. Approximately 20% of add-on downloads come directly from the Add-ons Manager, mostly from the recommended add-ons.

A number of folks on the add-ons and Firefox teams have been working the past few months on how to improve the way add-ons are managed in the browser in hopes of revamping this dialog in time for the next big release of Firefox.

Jennifer Boriss has led the user experience efforts of this project and has made several blog posts on this topic, including some huge plans to move the Add-ons Manager into a tab. This will give us much more room to expose additional data about add-ons and provide new functionality like letting add-ons place preferences right in their details view.

I started to think about how we could improve the “Get Add-ons” pane of this new Add-ons Manager design and provide much more useful content than a random selection of 5 featured add-ons. Content that is updated regularly, localized for the user’s country and language, and most importantly, useful.

I created a rough mock-up of what I thought this could look like, and Sean Martell turned it what we’ve nicknamed the Discovery Pane:

The content area is dynamic and loaded from a remote source, so it can be updated anytime and easily localized. A few of the sections shown above include:

• What are add-ons? – it turns out that right now we don’t really tell users what an add-on is before we show them 5 and suggest that they install them. This section fixes that, and will disappear after a user has installed a few add-ons.
• Rock Your Firefox featured add-on – we recently launched Rock Your Firefox to showcase a new consumer-friendly add-on three times a week, and could show the currently featured add-on in this panel.
• Top Add-ons – This is just a list of some of the most popular add-ons that are compatible with your version of Firefox and your platform
• Links to view all Personas, themes, and add-ons – the links at the bottom will always be there and open the appropriate landing pages of the add-ons gallery in a new tab.

The panels that are shown will differ depending on what content we want to show at a given time, and in some cases we may have panels that rotate between several views. One of the new features I hope we’ll be able launch with this is Personal Recommendations, where users can opt-in to telling us what add-ons they have installed in exchange for recommendations of what add-ons they might like, based on what we know about other users who use the same add-ons and have opted-in to telling us.

I’m very excited about the potential for this new Discovery Pane and the new Add-ons Manager in general, as I think it will make a huge difference in how people find cool new add-ons to try out, and especially for new users who haven’t customized their browser yet. What do you think?

Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.

As someone whose job is working with Firefox Add-ons every single day, you can imagine my shock when I learned that IE has almost all of the features of our top add-ons built right in! I did some research trying to figure out how this could have happened, and realized that, like much of the “Get the Facts” section, it is completely untrue.

Let’s take a look at the top 15 most popular add-ons in Firefox, as listed on the Firefox Add-ons site:

I’m not convinced that two out of fifteen top Firefox add-ons being natively supported in IE8 should be considered “almost all”. However, if you’re interested in the add-ons that provide IE’s functionality in Firefox, take a look at these collections of add-ons that bring things like accelerators and web slices to Firefox.

IE8 is certainly leaps and bounds better than IE6, but neither claiming to support nor actually supporting the functionality of Firefox’s top add-ons is the best way to compete with Firefox’s add-ons ecosystem. Web slices sound delicious, but my personal opinion is that most new features of web browsers today should be implemented as add-ons and not as core features. That’s not to say I think Firefox is there, but I think we’re going in the right direction. As we like to say, one size doesn’t fit all.

Does a Super Bowl ad “feel” Mozilla, even with community involvement? Unlike Download Day or the NY Times Ad, appearing on the Super Bowl just doesn’t seem to fit our DNA.

Yes. I think the community coming together to plan and organize something makes anything feel Mozilla, whether it’s sending a laptop to space to claim 100% of the non-Earth market share, sponsoring every Red Panda exhibit in the world, or running a historic Super Bowl ad.

In fact, Firefox is growing even faster overseas. Which makes advertising on the Super Bowl curious. As a very US-centric event, there’s little reason to spend nearly an entire year’s marketing budget on something that so few current and potential new Firefox users will see.

Firefox’s amazing growth overseas is certainly great, but I see it as even more of a reason to make sure our growth in the US stays strong. I disagree that there will be “so few current and potential new Firefox users” watching the Super Bowl — I think it’s the perfect opportunity to get exposure in front of the non-technical audience that’s hardest for us to reach. And, who isn’t a potential new Firefox user, anyway?

It seems that over the last few years, the only way to generate press from your Super Bowl Ad is to show scantily clad women or do something incredibly controversial. … Simply running user-generated or community sponsored commercials is unoriginal and likely wouldn’t provide any additional press.

I’ve never really been one to fit in, but I have to think there are others like me who remember well-done ads long before they can remember a sexual or controversial ad. All we have to do is peak someone’s interest enough to get them to do a search for “firefox” a week later when they see “web browser” mentioned on a website and never thought twice about it before.

NBC used to use the slogan “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you” to promote re-runs. Any Firefox community member who sees a Super Bowl ad would get goosebumps. Any Firefox user who sees a Super Bowl ad would be proud. And I really don’t see a non-Firefox user or reporter who sees a Super Bowl ad saying “community-backed commercials are so unoriginal” and refusing to pay it any attention. I think it’s much more likely that when the Firefox logo appears, one of the people at a Super Bowl party says “Hey, I use Firefox! It’s great!” and the other people at that party remember what he said next time IE crashes.

Retention marketing is indeed a challenge. However, the linkages between Firefox and improved retention by spending an entire year’s marketing budget on 60 30 seconds of TV is misguided. To retain a user (or buyer), an organization needs to consistently engage with them over time.

For existing Firefox users, this isn’t going to come and go in 30 seconds. Before the commercial, getting support and funding for this will be a monumental task, and will involve Firefox users talking to their friends and keeping them involved. After the commercial, when a coworker walks up and sees you using Firefox and says “hey, didn’t I see an ad for them last month?”, you can proudly tell them that they did and why you love it.

The effects of the crop circle, Download Day, and the New York Times ad weren’t constrained to the first-hand witnesses of the events. They had effects on Firefox users and non-Firefox users alike who heard about them and wondered (or already knew) what was so great about a web browser that made people do these things. That’s engaging with users over time brought to a whole new level.

I think the idea is worthy of further discussion and look forward to reading additional points of view. And by the way, I haven’t watched the Super Bowl in years.

Today, Thunderbird 3 beta 1 was released. I tried it out and immediately switched to using it as my default client. The upgrade from 2.0 was seamless, and I’m really enjoying the new features and interface. Of course, one of my favorites is the new Add-ons Manager, first introduced in Firefox 3. It will now be possible to install extensions from AMO directly in Thunderbird by searching for them in the Add-ons Manager.

Speaking of beta releases, Firefox 3.1 beta 2 was released yesterday with Private Browsing mode, TraceMonkey turned on, and one of my favorite less-announced features: being able to drag the window around on Mac from any part of the chrome (also available in Thunderbird 3.0b1!).

Lots of exciting things so far this week, and it’s only Tuesday!

Firefox 3 has been released! Check out all the new features (or see the field guide) and then go download it!

We’re aiming to set a world record with the most software downloads in 24 hours, so if you’re already using a Firefox 3 beta, make sure to download the full version from mozilla.com. Keep in mind that if you’re using Firefox 2, you will not automatically be prompted to upgrade to Firefox 3 yet, so you’ll have to download it yourself.

That huge spike at the beginning of April is when Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released. The gaps in the graph are when the term wasn’t mentioned enough to be recorded. Comparing the results of other browsers isn’t too helpful as Safari and Opera are common nouns, and most people would abbreviate Internet Explorer as IE.

Although no actual numbers are given, it’s still cool to be able to visualize a part of the biggest way Firefox is adopted around the world: telling your friends about it.

The little search box on every page of Bugzilla is useful for more than just typing in bug numbers – it actually has a pretty detailed syntax that can be used to narrow down bug queries faster than using advanced search in many cases. Jesse has a page listing all of the tricks, but I’ll mention a few of the ones I use.

Using a colon in QuickSearch specifies the product or component to search in. For example, :firefox would search bugs in the Firefox product and :mozilla.org searches mozilla.org, addons.mozilla.org, and a number of components in Websites.

QuickSearch defaults to searching only open bugs, but adding “ALL” as the first word of your search will make it search both open and closed bugs. @ will search for bugs assigned to that user. So, “ALL :addons @fligtar” returns all bugs I’ve fixed or am currently assigned to in addons.mozilla.org product.

QuickSearch is great in itself, but combined with SearchWords, it’s even better. (SearchWords is part of Firefox 3, so you only need to install it in Firefox 2.) I have the “bug” keyword associated with the Bugzilla@Mozilla search engine, so typing in “bug :cvs” in the location bar will return all of the open CVS Account requests.

I never bookmark bugs because of this method, even if it means once a day doing Command + T, Command + L, “bug :addons statistics” to find the same bug over and over.

The browser just feels faster, and OMG cocoa widgets and unified toolbar! One of my favorite features that I’m slowly taking advantage of is being able to start typing any part of a url or page title and have the page I was looking for appear right in the URL bar.

So, if you want to try it out, head on over to the download page. And if you’re on Mac, I highly recommend installing the prototype theme of the visual refresh – it’s awesome. (Note: this is still a beta, so bad things could happen, so use at your own risk! But if you’re on Mac, it’s pretty much worth it.)

If you’re looking for information on what’s in Firefox 3, check out the release notes page. I’ve included a short summary from the announcement of the main things below in case you’re not interested in the details.

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, native web page form controls, color profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

Huge thanks and congrats to everyone that’s been working for so long on Firefox 3 and Gecko 1.9 (27 months!).

In other news, Firefox 2.0.0.3 was released tonight. Help -> Check for Updates if you can’t wait!

Also, I don’t think I mentioned it before, but my name is in the Firefox 2 credits. It’s over a minute into them, so I took a screenshot for you because you’re impatient. Yes, you. It’s sorta interesting that I actually know who most of the people in that long list are and met many of them at the summit.

I have some other stuff to talk about, but I’ll make a different post on that later.