We’ve heard questions from many users over the years as to why we kept the Personas name, and even ran tests that showed users are more likely to try out Personas when called by a different name. “Persona” is a good name, but is probably better suited for a different product in the future.

So, we’d like to rename Personas to something more understandable and localizable. And we’d love your help.

We’ve come up with several options for a new name and want to know what you think. Please take a look at the poll below and submit your vote by Wednesday, February 8. Your choice will play a big role in which name we choose, as well as other factors including the word’s meaning in other cultures and languages.

We expect this transition to take place over the coming weeks. Thanks for your help, and please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

VOTE NOW

If you are a Firefox developer, support professional, or contributor, your help is critical—if you think there might be a compatibility issue in any of the release channels, please file a bug here so we can take action right away if needed.

In general, it would be super helpful for everyone to install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter and let us know through the reporter if your add-ons are working properly.

Your help is greatly appreciated!

You can read more about the plan, including how we determine eligibility for automatic compatibility here. For additional background reading, check out this blog post.

Once you have Aurora installed, all add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4 or later can be installed without extra steps. Firefox will install them even if they are declared incompatible in the manifest file.

If you don’t already have Aurora installed, you can get it here. With Aurora, you’ll see our newest features before they go beta, and have a chance to send us feedback before the final release.

Please send us feedback or file bugs on the new default to compatible feature here. We look forward to hearing from you!

It’s push day, and there are two new features we’d like to highlight:

Improved Stats Dashboard

The dashboard is now faster, easier to use, and better looking:

• More data at a glance: we added three charts displaying popular stats that used to require multiple clicks to reach—most-used applications, most-used languages, and most-used OSes.
• Better performance: we migrated the dashboard from PHP to Python as part of a larger AMO initiative, and the move has improved load times. We focused on moving the major features, and may migrate more features in upcoming releases. If there is a feature in the old dashboard that you think is critical and it isn’t available in the new dashboard, please let us know.
• Redesigned interface: we updated the look and feel of the dashboard to make it more visually pleasing and easier to read.

See the improvements in action here.

Ajax Search Results

We’ve made it faster and easier to page through search results using Ajax. Rather than load new pages as you browse through results, new results are shown in-line.

• Auto-detect filtering: we automatically detect your Firefox version and operating system and show you the filtered results.
• Collapsible sidebar facets: choose additional filtering parameters in the sidebar and see new results in-line.
• Shortcut keys: on any search results page, simply use your left and right arrow keys to toggle between pages.

See the search results page in action here.

Please give the new features a spin and let us know what you think!

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
-Arthur Dent, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Thursday is push day. It’s the day the AMO team gathers on IRC, figures out what’s going out and sets it loose on the world with the push of our Big Red Button. A lot of the time, we don’t push anything too exciting for users — it’s mostly big backend changes or minor bug fixes. This week, however, we pushed two important features; both done by Chris Van Wiemeersch.

Search Suggestions

We’ve been working hard over the past few months to make our search as awesome as possible. A few weeks ago, it got both a fresh coat of paint and a completely new engine. This week, we’ve taken it a step further — instant search suggestions, as you type. Try it out »

So, as you type, you’ll instantly see the add-ons with names that match your search query. If you hit <Enter>, you’ll be taken to a search results page as usual. You can go straight to an add-on by using your up/down arrow to select an add-on before hitting <Enter>.

There’s a little trick for you keyboard fans out there — hitting “s” on any AMO page will focus your cursor on the search box so you can just start typing.

Add-on Dependencies

Many add-ons require another add-on to be installed before it will work. We don’t currently enforce this anywhere, however we now give add-on developers a way to indicate this on the add-on detail page. Check it out »

Developers can indicate which add-ons are required in the Technical section of the Edit Add-on page in the devhub. Much like search suggestions, add-ons are suggested for the developer as they type.

The Epilogue

That’s the awesome stuff Team AMO pushed live this week! (And lest you think the rest of us took the week off and let Chris do all the work, we have a complete list of what went out today.)

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!