Comments on: Add-on development just got easier

By: Sekizaru

Sekizaru — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:13:37 +0000

This is a bit late but I was just looking back over the statistics for my add-ons for the past few months and noticed a big drop off in downloads at the end of September. One add-on went from an average of 230 downloads/day down to 100/day, another from 30/day to 8/day. The drop starts on September 30th which led me to this post.

I also checked the total download stats and there is a drop in downloads from ~1.6m/day before this release to ~1.3m/day afterwards.

Do you have any insight into what would have caused this?
My guess is that it is related to search. The new statistics for download source would solve this but weren’t available at the time.

Other than that, congratulations on all the improvements made to AMO over the past few months. It’s really making a difference

By: Johan Bouwer

Johan Bouwer — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:42:15 +0000

Sorry this is the only forum I could find to post a comment. Is it possible for developers to create a small-add on that searches for free and I mean free ebooks? Weather it is for Microsoft Reader, PDF books, or reading tablets.

Thanks

By: Nickolay Ponomarev

Nickolay Ponomarev — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:12:16 +0000

Where should the feedback on the hub’s content go?

1) “XUL Style Guide” linked from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/reference is an old page migrated from mozilla.org and never updated. It’s confusing and not very useful, except for the part where it recommends to make XUL localizable.
2) “Gecko CSS Reference” wrongly links to “CSS” on MDC instead of CSS Reference.

And while everything about the hub is great (congrats!), I disagree that creating yet another forum for add-on developers “bring[s] the add-ons community closer together”, if anything it fragments the community even more.

By: SWDict

SWDict — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:06:57 +0000

Love the tools to make developers work easier. I see a lot of room for more add-ons to make Firefox and other Mozila browsers more productive – more than IE will ever be!

Thank you!!

By: Mony

Mony — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:39:08 +0000

Firefox whole popularity is highly based on its add ons. If the development of such add ons become such easy then I can predict more add ons will be developed in future right?

By: patrickjdempsey

patrickjdempsey — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:10:06 +0000

So where is the developer toolbox or toolkit or whatever it was called? That was a GREAT tool. To have all of my add-ons in a nice sidebar list and above that all of my editing options in a sidebar list, that was good organization and good productivity. I maintain and manage 8 themes. Five of those show up in the main sidebar list on the “Hub” page. I see the Edit option there and that takes me into page after page of old fashioned Web 1.0 layouts. But if I click the “More Add-ons” link, there is no edit option. It does not make things easier to hide them in page after page of old fashioned layouts. The sidebar with all of the edit options was one of the best things about this site and now it’s gone? With the old layout I clicked at the top “Developer Toolkit” and that took me to a page with all of my add-ons listed, with current version listed and number of downloads and links to common tasks for each one. This is important data that allowed me to know at a glance what was being downloaded and what had been updated, and in a few clicks I was in editing descriptions to match a new update. Now where is all of that data and links? How many clicks down different paths do I have to take to get the simple information that I need on a regular basis? This change is not appreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to make things easier, but completely removing the most powerful productivity tool on this website is not that path IMO. Having the Hub may be very useful for many people, but the Hub should not be a replacement for the Toolkit, since they are obviously completely different tools for completely different things. I’m not sure exactly what the Hub is for, but I’m sure it’s good for something, just give me the option to have the old way back please!

By: avih

avih — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:53:19 +0000

P.S. to my previous comment:

I didn’t set an AMO nickname since I want the full name to appear (setting a nickname there will display it INSTEAD of the full name). May I suggest to also accept the AMO login email/password on the board?

By: avih

avih — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:49:27 +0000

Gotta join Josh about the transparency issue of the review process. IRC channels are useless in this regard (unfortunately) and people there always seem to revert to “not my responsibility” answers when asking the hard questions.

I have few suggestions and would like to post them on the new board ( https://forums.addons.mozilla.org/index.php ) but it doesn’t accept my AMO username (full email) /password combination.

Any help with that?
thanks in advance.

By: Dave Dash

Dave Dash — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:01:51 +0000

Hi Josh,

We do care and we do feel bad that while we really want to make developing addons easier (hence the developer hub) we also want to speed up the queue and give developers some indication of how long they might wait. In a way we’re making an existing problem harder.

However, we’ve already implemented a few things, like static analysis that can raise a few red flags so developers find out right away if there’s some simple mistakes rather than months later after a manual review. We’ll continue to build on this and refine it.

As much as automation has helped, we still need to make sure that whatever we do maintains the quality of the addons available. There’s a certain amount of trust associated with downloading from AMO and we want to maintain that.

Also, in the last month we’ve been burning down the review queue quite a bit. We’ll try to be more transparent about that, so that developing addons isn’t a frustrating process.

Cheers,
-dd

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:00:44 +0000

This is really great, congratulations!
You guys do a great job providing tools to build add-ons, this is fantastic, but why don’t you do anything regarding the review process? what’s the point of all these big stuff if add-on developers need to wait 3 (and even more) months(!!!) to have their add-on become public?
I don’t think you know how frustrated it is to work so hard on an add-on, and see this “experimental” label without knowing your real status.
It feels like no one cares…you MUST do something about it!