New Mozilla Add-ons an inch short of the perfect central
Mozilla has unveiled the new version of Mozilla Add-ons, the official repository for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird extensions, plugins, search plugins and themes.
As seen in the February preview, it provides a cleaner interface, puts search front and central, and the interface is available in 24 languages, a very important achievement.
A welcomed improvement is that it detects the browser version and either displays an Install button (Download for Thunderbird add-ons) for compatible add-ons and notifies the incompatibilities for those that aren’t. I would like a checkbox where I could quickly filter incompatible add-ons in or out.
New add-ons that are awaiting review and approval are included in search results and lists marked as experimental and with a link to logon to be able to install them. While it is good to be able to see them, I miss an option to filter them in or out.
Add-on profiles include a download counter for every add-on so you can judge its popularity, several screenshots thumbnails that open in the same page, and a compact area to rate and review it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t address the biggest concern with February’s preview: the inability to search themes, dictionaries and search engines independently. For example if I am looking for the Wikipedia search plugin, I’d enter wikipedia in the search box and select the Search Tools category, but the results include several other search and Wikipedia related extensions all mixed up and it will be pretty hard for a new user to identify what he needs to add it to his search bar.
The tiny Search Plugin, Theme and Dictionary links below the add-on categories list in the front page doesn’t help much either. If you click on the Theme link, the new page is dominated with two recommended extensions not themes. An option to browse them (not search) is in a lower panel.
Search plugins, themes and dictionaries are very specific and different. A user may want to add a Yellow Pages thingy to his search bar and will be overwhelmed with too many unrelated stuff: experimental and incompatible extensions and themes that has nothing to do with what he’s looking for.
It seems the functionality is there to make finding a specific add-on (50% of visitors according to Mozilla Add-ons’ Basil Hashem) a dead-simple task. I suggest adding pure themes, pure search plugins and pure dictionaries categories to the search menu, and a couple of checkboxes to include incompatible and experimental (sandboxed) add-ons, unchecked by default. Or at least make the theme, search plugins and dictionaries browsing panels central in their respective pages.
A lot of search plugins have been added making it a more serious alternative to Mycroft, but still there are several heavyweights missing like YouTube or Mininova, or, for Spanish speakers, the Real Academia de la Lengua plugin.
I also noticed there are some bugs that made Firefox add-ons incompatible with my Firefox 3 nightly appear as downloadable (not installable). Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to consistently reproduce it but will report as soon as I do.
Mozilla Add-ons’ Basil Hashem provides more details in his blog.
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March 28th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I wish it just wouldn’t show incompatible extensions at all. I want to see stuff I can use with the version of Firefox I’m currently running, not search and search through tons of extensions that are useless to me.
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March 28th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Good points there. I very much agree with your views on the search plugins, themes and dictionaries.
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March 28th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Sorry, but AMO 3.2 is far, far from perfect.
Things missing:
(Long time bug) Registered users STILL cannot change their email addresses.
(Regression) Cannot install or download “incompatible” add-ons like the previous version. Many users use “incompatible” add-ons or download add-ons for use on other versions of Firefox. Making users have to “jump through hoops” to do things they could much more easily is NOT perfection.
(Regression) Cannot easily find newly updated add-ons, a necessity if the user installs add-ons globally (in the program installation extensions folder). If user tries to install “automatically” the add-on goes from being installed in the program installation extensions folder to the extensions folder in the profile in use when doing the automatic add-on update or visiting AMO 3.2.
In conclusion, AMO 3.2 is far, far from perfect.
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March 28th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
There is another nuisance: it is hard to believe that they still did not provide an option to only show addons that are compatible with a specific selected FF/TB version, OS or combination thereof.
The limitations to finding one’s way among addons and the limitations of the search functions are just pathetic.
This is one of the most important and most central web sites for Firefox users and after years they still cannot even get close to making this useful.
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March 28th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
The only thing I think shouldn’t be removed is the display of Firefox version supported by the extension.
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March 28th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
I agree the search is a bit lacking and a big disappointment. Basil Hashem commented on my blog the way around the unable to install incompatible add-ons:
…visit the “Advanced Details” section and take a look at the Complete Version History link - it includes all available versions and doesn’t do the smart detection so that testers, developers and others can download any version of an add-on (for whatever OS platform and edition of Firefox) you want without the hassle.
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April 4th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
really annoying that it doesn’t let you download incompatible addons as you can force them to install using nightly tester tools, i am having to use opera just to download addons!
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Okay…the old site had a sidebar that plainly listed “Plugins” as one of the choices. Not Search plugins, I mean plugins like Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime…that sort of thing. Did they just do away with this feature when they revamped the site or are we suppose to guess where it is now? Please don’t tell me you have to wander around the Internet until you find a site that asks you to install a missing plugin.
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April 20th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I don’t know whether it is connected with the new site or not, but I can no longer download any add-ons for Thunderbird at all. Whenever I try, I get the message “Internet Explorer cannot download [filename].xpi from addons.mozilla.org. Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.”
I’ve tried many times later but always get the same error. MSIE seems to be working elsewhere, so I guess the mozilla site is currently bust?
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