Mozilla Add-ons Blog

Dear Add-on authors: Firefox 3.6 beta1 is out!

It’s time to start checking your compatibility with 3.6 and updating your add-on if necessary. The add-on review queues are normally very busy during update times, so you should follow these guidelines to make sure your add-on stays up to date and it doesn’t have to wait too long for a review:

1. Visit Firefox 3.6 for developers and read all about the changes that have been introduced in Firefox 3.6. Some additional information for theme authors is available in this forum topic.
2. Stay up to date with Mozilla news and check http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html frequently for new releases.
3. Test your add-on with the beta and see if there are any compatibility problems. Most add-ons should be fine.
4. If the current version of your add-on doesn’t show any compatibility issues, you don’t need to upload a new version. Visit the Developer Hub: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/ and change the max version value in the latest version of your add-on (it’s in the Versions and Files section). That’s all it takes. You are now able to set your compatibility to 3.6.*, which shows that no big changes are expected between beta 1 and the final release
5. If you do need to update your add-on for 3.6, submit your update as soon as possible. There will be an update rush after the final release of 3.6, and it will probably take a while for the AMO editor team to catch up.

Also, if you have binary components, some important changes have been made to the C API which might affect your add-ons. Make sure you build your add-on against the newest SDK, which is version 1.9.2. The new SDK should be available in the Gecko SDK page.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post here, or at the new AMO forum.

Happy coding!

PS to developers and users: you can install our band new Compatibility Reporter tool to help developers know which add-ons work on 3.6 and which don’t.

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.

With the Extend Firefox contest over, I wanted to see where entries were coming from so I created some quick charts that show which countries were represented via the various submissions:

These charts show me we need stronger developer outreach outside of North America & Europe. South America, for example, is a hot bed of developer talent (Brazil & Chile come to mind) and helping those developers understand the viability & power of the Mozilla platform is extremely important.

Thankfully, we’ve recently brought on Jorge Villalobos as our Developer Relations Lead. Being based in Central America (Costa Rica to be exact) will definitely allow him to increase the awareness of our tools in the surrounding countries.

A surprise from the stats was India which was 6th on the list of contributed add-ons. This is a geo we need to look at closer to see how we can build stronger developer ties there.

It was really cool to see a nice sampling on countries participating. Great motivation to keep spreading the word worldwide.

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.

A server problem has prevented add-on statistics for 08-31-2009 and 09-01-2009 from being processed correctly. The Metrics team is currently working to resolve this and the data for those days should be restored soon.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

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.