The AMO team has been hard at work for the last many months on a major site redesign and is pleased to announce the availability of the new AMO site. This is a significant release and chock-full of goodies for end users and add-on authors alike. The focus has been predominantly to provide a visual refresh, simplify navigation and rework the add-on developer tools area. But that doesn’t quite capture just how much effort has gone into this release. So, here is a full rundown of all the changes.
What’s New in AMO 3.2?
Visual Identity & Navigation
- An easy-on-the-eye visual identity (called “Eco” for its soothing color) with new menus, buttons, drop-down lists, and site header
- Add-on categories available from all pages for easier navigation
- Quick links to dictionaries, themes & search engines
- More add-ons can be viewed per page (configurable for up to 100/page)
- Indicator status such as “experimental” (aka sandbox) or “recommended” is displayed
- An “Application” drop down menu for easy access to Thunderbird, SeaMonkey & Sunbird add-ons
- Experimental/Sandbox addons are shown even when a user is not logged in but installation requires login. Removed option for “include sandbox items” from user preference.
Smart Install Buttons
- As we are in a transition time between Firefox 2 and preparing for the release of Firefox 3, we’ve added OS platform and Firefox version detection to the “Add to Firefox” buttons that appear. So, depending upon the version of Firefox that you are using and the compatibility of the add-on, you’ll see one of the following:
- When an add-on is compatible with your version of Firefox, you’ll see
- When an add-on is only compatible with an older version of Firefox, you’ll see
- When an add-on is only compatible with a newer version of Firefox, you’ll see
- If the add-on is in the sandbox, it’ll be marked “experimental”, and you’ll need to login to install it
- For Thunderbird, add-on buttons indicate “Download Now” instead of “Add” to more accurately reflect what happens
Add-on Search
- About 50% of users come to AMO to search for a particular add-on. It used to be exceedingly difficult to do that. So, we’ve given the search box in this new design significant prominence.
- Ability to limit searches within categories
- The search result page now has install buttons (no need to go to the details page any more)
- Experimental (sandbox’ed) add-ons are now shown in search results and clearly marked (no need to switch between public and sandbox search any more)
Site Content
- Add-on download counts are now visible publicly to help users discover popular add-ons
- A revised ratings form with a new 5-point rating scale. (All previous add-on ratings have been adjusted accordingly.)
- A revamped add-on version history page (without Smart install buttons so that you can download add-ons for any Firefox version or OS platform)
- A new viewer for add-on images
- Massively revised dictionaries & language pack page with support for more than 60 languages.
Featured & Recommended Add-ons
- We’ve revamped how recommended add-ons work. In the past there was a single list of recommended add-ons that was available. From that list, one was randomly selected and featured on the AMO front page. As this list grew, there was less “exposure time” for each add-on and no filtering whatsoever.
- This revision of AMO introduces two new capabilities: featured add-ons and locale-specific targeting.
- Now, when an add-on is marked as recommended it is done so for a single category. The revised category pages include 2 “slots” where recommended add-ons will appear. See the Social & Communications category for an example. We will be increasing the number of recommended add-ons to accommodate these extra slots.
- Featured add-ons are a selection of recommended add-ons that are shown in one of 3 slots on the front page of AMO. Caegory recommended add-ons will be rotated on a regular basis onto the front page.
- We’ve also added per locale featured and recommended lists – this allows AMO editors and the Mozilla community to tailor AMO for particular locales
- Themes can also be recommended
Search Engines
- Revised search engines page (and added OpenSearch support)
- Support for search engine categorization
- Firefox search field integration on the search engine details pages. You can easily add search engines using the Firefox Search Engines menu
Discussions…Frozen
- Feedback from many add-ons authors indicated that they were dissatisfied with the discussion system on AMO, mostly because most authors already maintained a separate support forum elsewhere. mozillaZine Forums, MozDev forums or other. So, we’ve frozen all existing add-on discussions. Users can no longer add new topics but existing topics can be read. We’ll maintain the content for a few months and then eventually remove them.
- As a replacement for discussions, we’ve added new support forum URL & support email links for each add-on. Add-on authors should edit their add-ons and point to either a support email or a support forum location and AMO will link to there.
- Required Actions for add-ons authors: Determine a location for your support discussions and update your add-on please.
Developer Tools
- The ever clever Justin Scott was the brains behind the reworking of this area of AMO. He’s blogged about this earlier during the beta cycle.
- A new add-on dashboard with summary information (along with an RSS feed that you can subscribe to)
- Authors will also find beautiful, functional charts that graph both add-on active daily users (ADU) as well as total downloads
- The entire data history of the add-on from July 2007
- Graph zoom in/out and expand graph capabilities
- For active users, you can filter and chart by the versions of the add-on, by versions of Firefox, by addon status or by users’ operating system
- Add-on authors may choose to make their detailed statistics public – you can visit this link to see which add-ons have opted to do this
- Finally, you can export the data as a CSV in order to perform your own analysis
An amazing 24 languages!
- That’s right. From Albanian to Ukrainian, we’ve got your locale. Special thanks go out to the Mozilla web localizer community who did an incredible job to help us simultaneously launch this site with 24 languages!
- The list includes: Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Spain) and Ukrainian
This has been an incredible effort and lots of long hours by many groups. Please help me congratulate the entire dev, QA, UX, product, IT/Operations, AMO Editors and localization teams for helping make this a great release.
Enjoy!
For those that love detail – here’s a full list of fixes as tracked in Bugzilla
Why do we have to register now to download extensions and themes? That sucks, and will probably hurt firefox addoption as it will be more difficult to get to the extensions. And why is there a dump version check instead of simply writing which version it works with? The new site looks nice but it’s a step backward in functionality.
I took a quick spin through the MozillaZine forum topic that DavidONE mentions (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=642440) and was curious how many people were participating.
A tiny bit of vimming later …
There are 210 messages in the topic written by 59 participants.
More than 50% of the messages come from the 10 most active thread participants.
For at least the last five years I checked each day for “New” extensions. Why you got rid of “New” is beyond me.
As many have already pointed out the new design is “pretty Useless”…
Zak,
The mozillazine thread I referenced is not the only one expressing great displeasure at the AMO makeover – there are many others.
Regardless, it doesn’t negate the numerous arguments for why the redesign is a resounding failure, and the more I’ve used it the more I mumble ’stupid, stupid’ as I attempt to achieve basic tasks.
Also, a response to the criticism from those involved is conspicuous by its absence – which was predicted by the regulars at mozillazine. It all smacks of ‘ivory tower’ development.
* Why do I have to register to add a review? Can’t you use some spam filter/captcha for anonymous reviews? I think the most valuable feedback comes not from fellow developers (more likely to have a mozilla.org account) but end users.
* The new UI is bad for beta testers. It usually takes weeks for extension developers to even bump their extension, if they care at all. There’s no info about what version an extension is compatible with. If I’m using fx3b5 an extension for fx3b5pre might just work. An extension for fx1.5 probably won’t. The worst thing is that with the new UI I can’t even download the extension to bump it myself if my firefox is a higher version. (Funnily the install links in version history aren’t disabled, as if an older version were more likely to work with my newer browser.)
“The compatibility information is missing, shame on you.
Can no longer see stuff like this:
“Works with: Firefox: 2.0.0.8 – 3.0b4″ next to the download/install button:”
I agree with he above poster, please, please, please bring this back.
I am not planning on upgrading to ffx 3.0 until I know that all my major extensions are compatible. I need to know what versions are acceptable for any given extension.
Please, please, please, bring this back!
There is an oversight in the design too – there is no link to the Plugins page listing things like Shockwave and Flash and the Firefox Windows Media plugin, (which is near impossible to find by googling.)
Luckily, google was able to find the plgins page for me.
I have tried to search addons and themes at their site to figure out if I want to upgrade to the next beta version. Besides the “search” not being reliable as it can’t find the darn thing when I know the name (great for a search engine) it then won’t let me log in to download the darn thing… I get login after I’m logged in and it just puts me in an endless do loop… why the heck do I need to log in anyway… try posting to their forum, same loop.
It is unbelievable that the two most fundamental pieces of information that anyone would want to know; Version Number & Date, are two tiers down… But, it looks good.
With the recent issues with AMO, and the lack of reliability of the new FF versions, the apparent bureaucracy creep, and segregation from their users community I spent the weekend setting up Opera. If Opera gets a decent AdBlock or I figure it out better… I’m gone.
Sad to see an organization succumb to the very attributes of the competitors that allowed it be born.
Regards
DavidONE,
I didn’t make any value judgement about the the stats or the criticisms – I measured and reported on the only link cited. Don’t be so defensive – you aren’t the poor devil getting flamed on your own blog by an angry mob (and neither am I this time.)
For my part, I’m happy that Basil and crew are publicly posting the rationale for their changes. Regardless of whether or not they did great work, royally screwed up or some of both, the information (and the capturing of people’s reactions) is still useful within Mozilla and for other FLOSS projects.
Zak,
Just for the record, I’m not being defensive. Let’s stick to the issues and try not to introduce emotive language, OK?
Your original reply to me appeared to be attempting to reduce the weight of my argument by demonstrating that far fewer people were dissatisfied than I suggested, while not addressing the issues raised. That’s all I was responding to.
Posting rationales and, to my eye, a round of self congratulations doesn’t amount to much when so many people are clearly unhappy and pointing out the reasons why.
It’s been two weeks since the AMO team announced the release and have remained silent to the wide-ranging criticism since then. That’s poor PR, at best.
We all screw up at times – it’s how you respond that’s critical.
I do like the look of the new add-ons page; but one key piece of information is missing: a date — whether submitted or updated — a date should be present with the name of the add-on, right on the main page.
I check the add-ons page every week (cuz, yes I *am* that anal-retentive), and, with a date, I know how far I need to go, until I’m looking at stuff I saw the previous week. Without a date, there’s no way to tell.
I would imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to place a date field on the main page, so that each entry had a date — then, sorting would be more meaningful, as well.
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Mandatory registration just to install an extension is bad enough, but requiring your email address is totally unjustifiable. The only possible reason they would need to collect the address of people who just download extensions would be to later spam them or sell them. It looks like Mozilla is looking for some new “revenue models”.
Am I dumb or is it still not possible to add search engines beyond those miserable 23 (including experimental engines a whopping 24!) search engines that aren’t even listed right away but through a link at the bottom of the page? Right now the whole thing looks very corporate, meaning closed, boxed in, with blinders on. The moment I realized the search engine feature had not only changed but made worthless, along with wrongly ending up on the “search tools” page was the first time I felt like leaving Firefox which I’ve been happily using since its early 0.x stages when it still ran under the old name.
Is the old “search engine” page still around somewhere?
Oh, well, through backlinks I just found out the old mycroft search engine page is still around at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/index.html and it’s working, too. Too bad it probably won’t get updated anymore. Too bad that less persistent types and newbies won’t even get to to know the wealth of what had been around search engine wise. What a waste…