Mozilla Add-ons Blog

About a year ago, Mozilla Labs launched Personas, a way to easily create and install lightweight themes for Firefox and Thunderbird.  Over 9 million downloads and 30,000 Personas later, we’ve included them on AMO as a new way to personalize your browser.  Simply click the Personas category on the left side of AMO and you’ll be able to quickly browse and preview Personas.

If you’re running the nightly build of Firefox 3.6- you’re in luck!  Personas support is baked in and will be a part of the final 3.6 release.  Otherwise, for those of you on Firefox 3 and 3.5, all you’ll have to do is install the Personas extension.  Once the extension is installed, you’ll be able to get live previews of personas and install them with a single click.  To learn more about Personas, including how to create your own in a few minutes, visit getpersonas.com.

Since the Contributions Pilot launched in July, we’ve been working hard to improve this feature and understand its impact on the community.  Since we launched the Contributions Dashboards in early September, we’ve been able to look at the data and gather our findings.

One of the first questions that developers want to know is whether or not they’ve picked the right contribution for their add-ons.  Let’s take a look at some charts:

In this chart, you can see a histogram of the total number of successful transactions for each amount paid.  The top 6 amounts are all $5 or under, with the notable exception of the $10 category.  Let’s take a look at the total revenue in each transaction bucket:

When we look at transactions and sort by total revenue per bucket, the story unfolds in an interesting way.  In this chart, you can see that the $10 contribution generates a majority of revenue for the measured six week period, especially when combined with the $9.99 bucket.  What this suggests is that the optimal price appears to be closer to $10 than $5, and that $10 isn’t a significant barrier for contributions.

It’s also great to know that out of 2,031 individual contributions, while 968 were for the requested amount, 742 contributions exceeded the requested amount, 159 went to add-ons with no requested amount, and only 162 were for less than the requested amount.

Of course, this isn’t a scientifically rigorous study, as the sample size is still too small for any strong conclusions, but it’s good to note that app store pricing doesn’t appear to apply to an ecosystem where all add-ons are free and paid contributions are strictly voluntary.  If a developer creates a great add-on and asks for $10, that double digit price doesn’t appear to be a barrier to donating.  In other words, add-ons users who enjoy using add-ons are also quite generous when they elect to donate contributions to those add-ons.

In future blog posts, we’ll explore the effect of employing the different mechanisms we have for letting users know about contributions.

Come join us at the new Mozilla HQ in Mountain View for some BBQ and a schedule that’s light on presentation and heavy on interaction.  Sign up here.

Festivities start at 7 and end at 9, hope to see you there!
Edit: due to the biggest storm since 1962, we’ve postponed the event.  Stay tuned for updates regarding the new time.  Thanks.

There’s been interest lately around the SkipScreen add-on and we’re happy to report that we will continue to list this add-on on our site.  We continue to support add-on developers like SkipScreen and work hard to provide the best selection of browser add-ons on the Web.

One thing we’ve done on AMO over the past couple months is make developer and user profiles prettier.  We’ve given you, our loyal users, the tools to make nicer user profiles so that others can get a better sense of who you are.  So put a face on  your add-ons, collections, and reviews by uploading a profile picture.  If you’re a developer requesting contributions for your add-on, your profile pictures also appear on your “Meet the Developer pages.

Simply log in to AMO and click “My Account” in the header to get started.

As we mentioned earlier this year, we’ve been thinking about adding tagging to make add-ons easier to classify and discovery.  Starting last week, any add-on in AMO can get tagged by users and developers alike.  For those of you unfamiliar with tagging, it’s simply a way to add words or phrases that describe an add-on to help users find and understand the purpose of an add-on.   So if you’re the kind of person who loves organization, go ahead and tag all the add-ons you love with words that you find useful.

Tags appear on the right side of all add-on listing pages, and there’s a simple UI for creating tags.  We allow spaces and most symbols, and tags will also show up in our updated search results page.  You’ll be able to see all add-ons with a certain tag simply by clicking on it, and tags are a great way to set keywords so your add-ons appear in searches for certain words or phrases.

Of course, individual developers have the final say on which tags go on their add-ons and they can delete any tags created by the community.  We’ll continue to develop this feature based on user feedback and we hope to find new and interesting ways of using this tag data to help users and developers.  Let us know what you think!

For those of you looking to nominate your add-on for public status, you no longer need to have reviews from users to submit the nomination. We made this change to help our developers as it was hard to get public reviews while still in experimental status. All other requirements for nomination stay the same, to learn more read our Reviewers’ Guide.