More Details
The last few weeks, Mozilla IT has addressed numerous stability issues with AMO and VAMO (versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org, which handles add-on update pings) and made significant changes to the network configuration to keep AMO up and running. One of those changes was the addition of a caching proxy in our Amsterdam datacenter, which was brought online on December 16 to receive 1/3 of the update ping traffic.

Unfortunately, these new servers were not configured to send their logs to our metrics processing tools, so those pings were not counted and the logs are no longer available. We were not immediately sure of the scope of the problem due to both the ongoing stability issues and expected decline in usage during the holidays and fluctuation in usage after a release. The log configuration was corrected yesterday afternoon and Metrics is validating today whether the logs are being processed correctly going forward.

Mozilla IT and Metrics are working on automated ways to prevent this from happening in the future as we continue to deploy AMO around the world. We know that many developers depend on these statistics, and apologize for the data lost over the past 2.5 weeks.

We’ve identified an issue in which some users may have one or more of their add-ons hidden after upgrading to the latest Firefox version, affecting both desktop and mobile. These add-ons and their data are still intact and haven’t actually been removed. We paused new updates to Firefox to minimize the potential impact on users and will soon release an update to fix this issue and ensure all your add-ons are visible and usable. In the meantime, if you notice an add-on missing entirely from the Add-ons Manager, you can use a simple workaround to recover them.

We are working hard to resolve this issue. We know how important add-ons are to you and apologize for the inconvenience.

Justin Scott, on behalf of the Firefox Add-ons team

One area we focused on improving with these pages is add-on compatibility with your browser: making it easier for pre-release users to install incompatible add-ons, and making it more apparent to mainstream users when an add-on isn’t going to work with their system.

Hiding Incompatible Add-ons

Soon, we hope to be able to hide incompatible add-ons from users when they’re browsing, with the option to show them anyway. But until that happens, we want to make sure users aren’t confused about what they can and can’t use. Our new designs make it quite apparent when an add-on isn’t going to work with your system by fading the listing out and requiring you to go its details page to install it.

Support for Pre-release Users

Fading out incompatible add-ons works fine for regular users, but when browsing AMO in an Aurora or Nightly build, it became very difficult to install incompatible add-ons with the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. So, AMO and the Add-on Compatibility Reporter now work together to make it easy to install incompatible add-ons.

If you have ACR installed, add-ons that haven’t yet declared compatibility with your version of Firefox will be installable, with a warning that they may be incompatible.

Additionally, if you’re using a Nightly or Aurora build of Firefox and don’t already have the Add-on Compatibility Reporter installed, you’ll now be encouraged to install it when you encounter a page that has an incompatible add-on on it.

Try out the new category pages and let us know what you think!

Add-on developers will likely notice this new system very soon, as they’ll begin receiving emails when users write reviews of their add-ons. Additionally, when developers reply to a user’s review, that user will now receive an email with the response. This has been one of AMO’s most-requested features for years, so we’re very happy to make it available.

We’re continuing to roll out more pages in our new design over the coming weeks and look forward to hearing your feedback on them.

AMO’s new home will provide it ample room to scale and allows us to use new services unavailable in San Jose, where it’s been served from the last 5 years.

Once the site is fully operational again, please let us know if you see any odd behavior that could be related to the move.

Take the Survey

Thank you to everyone who participates!

Firefox can complete a lot of tasks. It comes with the functionality to accomplish the tasks we believe most people want to finish, but everyone uses the Web differently. They often want to do tasks that we don’t enable Firefox to accomplish right out of the box. Add-ons tackle this issue — they enable everyone to get the functionality they want out of Firefox. Out-of-box functionality and add-on functionality come together to make Firefox.

The current add-ons installation and customization user experience does not reflect this:

Right now, add-ons feel like they were literally added on top of Firefox’s User Experience. The user experience shouldn’t make add-ons feel like they are awkwardly layered over our Firefox’s default UI — they should be fundamentally integrated into the UI so that Firefox fits your specific needs.

That’s why Firefox’s User Experience team is designing a new experience that reflects the fact that add-ons make up an integral part of Firefox Functionality:

Out-of-box functionality and functionality that comes from add-ons shouldn’t be treated differently because at the end of the day, to the user, there should be just Firefox functionality.

We will send out another post soon highlighting the ideas we have for this new user experience.