It turns out this is a “social plugin” from Facebook embedded in an iframe. As a (mostly former) web developer, I know that means CNN.com doesn’t actually know who I am; rather, that content is hosted on Facebook but embedded on CNN’s website in a way that CNN can’t access. But it’s ridiculous that I have to look at the source of a website and understand the DOM security model to know that. People see their friends’ activity on CNN.com and think the website knows who they are, and there’s no Facebook preference to turn that off.

Just to reiterate that, Facebook wants websites to embed iframes that can look just like their surroundings on the page and trick the user into thinking that website knows them and their friends, and didn’t bother including a way to turn that off. Maybe this iframe thing will catch on and my bank will start letting me log in from other websites too!

I considered these things and tried to think of any benefit of the Facebook service that came to close to outweighing its clear violation of my privacy. And then I deactivated my account. The answer was a definitive “no, I don’t even use the site that much anymore and don’t want to be involved if this is the direction they’re going”.

The first two days were rough; I had formed such a Facebook habit that I would go to click where my bookmark used to be and briefly hunt for it before remembering why it’s gone. But after that it got a lot easier, and today I didn’t really miss it or even think about it at all.

I’m not writing this post to try to convince anyone else to deactivate their accounts, though I know others who have for the same reasons. I understand that everyone values privacy differently (especially Facebook, apparently) and for some people the value provided really is worth the cost. I’m mainly writing it so that it’s public and I’ll be more likely to stick to my deactivation in case it gets more difficult to stay away. (ex-Facebook group therapy meetup, anyone?) Although, now that I’ve disabled third-party cookies in my browser, effectively turning off the “social plugins”, I might even consider reactivating my account down the road if they abandon this scary, scary direction they’re headed. But that seems pretty unlikely.

As the product manager of a website full of user-generated content, I try to keep up with what others solving some of the same problems are doing, and Facebook is certainly a leader in this space. That’s partly why I’m so disappointed that someone in a similar position made a conscious decision to make these new features opt-out and some parts not have an “off” switch at all. This is where I am reminded how awesome it is to work for a company that puts the user above everything else.

I guess Facebook and I will just have to agree to disagree on my privacy.

Times have changed, and last April, the add-ons team came up with a policy statement about respecting the choices a user has made, not changing defaults unless the user would expect that change, and not interfering with other add-ons. We hadn’t named the policy, so when it came time to blog about it, I read through it trying to think of a name that summarized our position. The result was the oft-cited “No Surprises” policy, now officially adopted after some slight modifications.

Frankly, I am still surprised on a weekly basis by the behavior of some add-ons and companies targeting add-ons. This recent flurry of issues we’re dealing with has left me wondering, “what’s so different between add-ons just a few years ago and now?” Money, of course.

In 2005, almost all add-ons were built as spare-time projects by students and people who had other full-time jobs. Now, many of the more popular add-ons are created by companies and add-on startups who need to find a way to make a money from their work.

To be clear, I’m not against add-ons making money. In fact, I very much support it when it’s done tactfully. Some of my favorite add-ons have figured out business models that work for them and still respect their users’ privacy and expectations.

The problem comes when add-ons want to:

• change the user’s default search provider without asking
• replace ads on websites with their own ads
• send all of the user’s search queries to a third party when the add-on isn’t related to searching
• bundle other add-ons or software the user didn’t ask for

There are add-ons that do all of these things, and there are companies actively soliciting add-on developers to adopt these practices in their add-ons. Some add-on developers are even approached about selling their add-on and all of its users so that the new owner can implement a monetization strategy above.

These are the sorts of issues that the AMO admin and editor teams deal with regularly now, and it shows how important it is that we continue to review add-ons to keep users safe. One bad add-on can easily stop someone from ever trying them again.

If you’re an add-on developer and you’re considering a partnership that would involve tampering with a user’s choices or privacy, make sure you’ve read our policy on the subject and are comfortable with the likely ramifications (bad ratings and reviews, loss of featured status, users switching to a competing add-on, etc.). If you have any questions about whether something is allowed, please contact the editor team for clarification. Keep in mind some companies that approach developers say their methods are approved by Mozilla, when in fact they aren’t.

If you’re an add-on user, always read an add-on’s description and privacy policy to make sure you understand what the add-on does. If you notice an add-on changes your defaults in an update without asking or makes another change that isn’t disclosed, please report it.

During the keynote of Add-on-Con 2009, I announced that Mozilla is planning to launch a marketplace pilot this year. That’s still the case, and in my opinion, it can’t come soon enough. There are many reasons I think we need to give developers a way to earn a living off of their hard work creating add-ons: it will increase the number of add-ons, the number of developers, and the quality of add-ons. But right now, the reason I most want an add-ons marketplace is to give developers an easy way to profit from their work so they don’t even have to think about going down the road of surprises.

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.

There are many blogs out there that are dedicated to covering one service. They usually make that pretty clear in their name. But I think it’s ridiculous for TechCrunch to have 8 posts in a single day related to Twitter (as they did yesterday) and to have only 2-3 days per month where they DON’T talk about Twitter. Twitter being down is not news. Twitter disabling search for a few hours is not news.

I was satisfied just leaving a short comment to this effect on the latest Twitter post, but after doing the brief post count research above and realizing how long I’ve tolerated this for, I’m no longer a TechCrunch reader. If they ever reduce the number of Twitter posts or perhaps split the mind-numbing posts off into TweetCrunch, I’ll be glad to hit the subscribe button again.

And like I said: I actually like Twitter. It’s gotta suck even more for the people that don’t care for Twitter.

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.