Designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas into working prototypes will learn to use the new Jetpack technology from Mozilla Labs to create Firefox add-ons to support learning on the open Web, using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The creators of the most promising add-ons will be invited to an intensive three-day Jetpack for Learning Design Camp (to be held in conjunction with SXSW Interactive in March 2010), where they’ll further refine their work and the best add-ons will be publicly recognized.

Learn more at the Jetpack for Learning website.

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We just dispatched emails to the developers of those add-ons as follows:

• 105 add-ons that we think are compatible. These add-ons had more than 80% of reports saying the add-on worked fine. For these add-ons, we suggest that the developer test the add-on out themselves and then bump compatibility to Firefox 3.6.*.
• 24 add-ons with compatibility issues. These add-ons had more than 80% of reports saying that the add-on was not functioning properly. We ask the developers of these add-ons to review the submitted reports and look into the issues mentioned before bumping compatibility.
• 321 add-ons with mixed reports. These add-ons have received a number of reports, but we couldn’t make a guess as to the status. We encourage these developers to view the submitted reports and then test their add-ons before bumping compatibility.
• 830 add-ons with at least one report, but not enough to determine anything. We’ve asked these developers to test their add-ons with Firefox 3.6 and bump compatibility if everything checks out.

The response to the Compatibility Reporter has been amazing, with almost 20,000 active users helping us out. Your reports will make a big difference in being able to ship Firefox 3.6 without add-on compatibility issues, so keep it up!

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Pledge Drives

Have you ever participated in a walkathon or donated to public radio?  If so, you’re familiar with the concept of a Pledge Drive, and we’re happy to report that developers can now post Pledge Drives for their add-ons.  Whether you’re trying to raise funds for a conference trip or want to turn off advertising in your add-on, you can set a pledge goal so users can have a hand in getting you there.  These pledge drives can be created from the Developer Control Panel and you can use your About Page to let your users know post-install.  Please note that you don’t have to use your About Page as a First Run page, and you can elect to show it only to users who have been using your add-on for a reasonable period.

Subscriptions

We’ve added a new option to the existing Contributions flow, so users can now elect to provide a regular monthly contribution for 12 months.  They’ll be automatically presented with this option when clicking the “Contribute” button on the Add-on listing and Meet the Developer pages.  We’ve also added a comment box so developers can hear directly from their loyal users.

Finally, for those of you receiving contributions, please consider sending a thank you note to your donors to thank them for their help.  It’s a small thing but will go a long way towards helping your users know that they made a difference.

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For those unaware, we have a review system that all new add-ons and add-on updates have to go through before they are available to the general public. The system is a combination of automatic code analysis and manual code and feature testing. The manual side is handled by a dedicated team of volunteers, known as AMO Editors. We’re a small group that has had to handle a massive amount of work, specially since the release of Firefox 3.5. We had spent the last year catching up with the numerous new submissions and updates, and the numbers will only grow once 3.6 is out.

Just 2 months ago, the new add-on review queue had over 600 pending add-ons, and the update queue had more than 250. Both had several months of waiting times, and add-on authors were increasingly unsatisfied, with good reason. Many trivial or important updates have had to wait a long time before seeing the public, causing users to complain and give add-ons bad reviews for the slow reaction of their authors.  That’s just unfair to add-on authors, and we needed a solution.

I joined Mozilla recently with a very clear objective: to reduce the review queues back to a manageable size. I have helped implement several solutions that would improve the state of affairs, like posting detailed weekly queue reports in the AMO forums, and temporarily hiring professional add-on developers to help with the burden. We estimate that our current volunteer team is large enough to keep up with the inflow, so now we just need to reduce queue size down to our ideal waiting expectations (2 weeks for nominations and 1 week for updates). After that I hope we will regain stability.

I’m happy to announce that our efforts have paid off. The latest queue report indicates that we’re down to 301 nominations, and 120 updates. That’s half of what we had 2 months ago! Just last month we reviewed over a thousand files, and our pace is increasing every week. About half of our pending reviews are within our ideal waiting time frames, and many of the ones that have been waiting for longer require an admin review for various reasons. Things are looking great.

There’s still lots to do in order to improve add-on author experience, and that is an ongoing effort. I’ve received quite a few suggestions on how to improve the reports, and I hope to implement those soon. If you’re a developer and you have anything else you’d like help with, don’t hesitate to contact me

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With tonight’s release, we’ve launched a pilot program to allow self-hosted add-ons to be listed on AMO alongside our thousands of Mozilla-hosted add-ons. We want users to be able to find any add-on they’re looking for on AMO, whether it’s hosted there or not.

These self-hosted add-ons won’t have all of the site features that other add-ons do, but will appear in search and browse listings, collections, and can be reviewed and rated. However, unlike our thousands of publicly-listed add-ons, these add-ons are not reviewed by Mozilla. Because of this very important distinction, instead of a green install button, self-hosted add-ons see a cautionary notice and link to the add-on’s homepage for additional information and to install the add-on.

Developers interested in submitting their self-hosted add-on or changing the hosting of their existing add-on should first read through additional details of the program.

Additionally with tonight’s release, we’ve added support for a much-requested feature over the last few years: HTML in add-on descriptions!

Several HTML tags, including links and lists, can now be used in four fields across the site: add-on descriptions, developer comments, version release notes, and user profiles. These fields and several others will also automatically link plain text URLs.

Stay tuned for information on additional features included with this release tomorrow!

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This was previously a gaping hole in our metrics, and a subject of much contention among Nick and myself (see also: relevance of my add-on’s icon to its functionality).

With the help of Daniel Einspanjer on our metrics team, we’re now able to analyze whether an add-on download came from an AMO search results page, the add-on’s display page, the Firefox Add-ons Manager, or one of around 12 predefined sources we are tracking.

Some of the results were surprising, so without further ado, this is the breakdown of downloads for a single day on AMO (yesterday, in fact).

Keep in mind that this covers 1.7 million downloads, so even sources that only have 1% of the pie can be up to 17,000 downloads. We’ll be digging into where our unknown downloads are coming from, but right now we think they are mostly downloads coming from other websites.

We didn’t want to keep all this data to ourselves, so add-on developers will find a new view in their Statistics Dashboards called “Download Sources” where the sources for each individual add-on can be dissected.

But wait, there’s more!

Our source tracking system also allows developers to add their own tracking codes for external links to their add-on. By simply adding a src parameter to any add-on’s URL or download URL, that source will start being tracked and appear in the Statistics Dashboard.

For example, when we launched the Add-on Compatibility Reporter a couple weeks ago, we had tracking codes in all of the most important places: the announcement blog post, the Firefox 3.6 beta first-run page and release notes, the hacks.mozilla.org post, etc. You can see the results of our efforts below:

There are some caveats to external source tracking, so be sure to read the full instructions by going to your Download Sources dashboard and clicking “learn how to track external sources”.

Have fun with the data, and if your research sparks an idea for how we can improve download conversions on a particular AMO page or another great idea, let us know!

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This year, Add-on-Con will be on December 11 at the same location, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. A number of Mozilla folks will be in attendance and leading sessions, including:

• Taking Flight with Jetpack: Next Gen Add-ons for Firefox – Aza Raskin
• Mobile Firefox Add-on Development – Mark Finkle
• The Future of the Add-on Ecosystem – Nick Nguyen and Justin Scott

We’ll also be participating in the closing keynote panel, Future of the Browser. Expect more details on these sessions in the near future, as the schedule gets finalized.

Registration is now open, so if you’re interested in browser add-ons, whether from the technical or business side, it’s a great place to learn about what’s coming, what’s already being done, and networking with browser vendors and other add-on developers.

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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.

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Before and after, there was plenty of time for socialization with the attendees and the feedback so far has been that the panel and Q&A was very informative, and we enjoyed our opportunities to talk with add-on developers one-on-one and listen to their concerns. We’re hoping to start having these meetups every other month, so make sure to join our group to be the first to know about the next one.

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