ShareThis

Our top 5 requests were:

1. The biggest request involves the review queue and the time it takes to get out of the sandbox. (24 requests)
2. There is a real need for better documentation. (22 requests)
3. Tutorials are scattered across the internet and are often out of date.  (21 requests)
4. The IDE’s/tools for writing and debugging extensions could be better.  (15 requests)
5. A few developers really want some sort of marketplace for extensions. (6 requests)

These are all great responses and we’re very aware in particular of the need to improve the sandbox as well as provide a central place for all documentation and tutorials related to addons.

With each release, we’re making small improvements to make the sandbox process better, with the goal of planning and implementing larger improvements in parallel.  For instance, in this latest release, we’ve added a feature that automatically notifies editors when an add-on they’ve reviewed gets changed, thus making sure that the right attention goes to add-on developers who are responding to a rejection.  In the future, we’re looking at creating audit tools that developers can use to scan their add-ons for common problems that trigger rejections, and providing greater transparency into the queue so you can get a sense of when you can expect a review to happen.

For documentation and tutorials, we’re looking at creating a sister site to AMO that caters to both new and experienced developers.  This site will highlight the best of what the community has to offer in addition to providing community features that help connect developers to each other.  The goal isn’t to replace the existing developer resources, but to centralize and highlight content and information in a way only an add-ons specific site can. We’re incredibly excited about what we’re tentatively calling Developer.AMO and we feel it will do a lot to address the issues around documentation and support that developers have voiced.

Finally, some of you have asked about a marketplace for add-ons.  This is something we’d like to hear more about, as it’s something we haven’t made any decisions on and would like to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see and how you think it would work.

While I listed the top 5 responses, we got lots of other feedback that we’re taking to heart.  Here are the anonymized results, let us know if there’s anything on there that you think needs more attention.

As for next steps, we’re planning a session where you can come visit us in person in Mountain View or virtually via air.mozilla to talk about what you’d like to see from us in 2009 and beyond.  This will happen some time in April, and we’ll give you plenty of advance notice so that you can attend.

ShareThis

We have quite a few responses to the survey- as a friendly reminder we’ll be closing the survey this week and start compiling the results. So if you’d like your voice to be heard, please fill out the survey:

• Extension Developer Survey

Thanks!

Nick

ShareThis

• Extension Developer Survey

Please take it and let us know how we can make your lives easier.

We’ll follow up in a couple weeks with results and plan some sessions where we can engage directly on the future of extensions and AMO.

Nick

ShareThis

We had a total of 265 surveys completed. Note that some questions were mandatory, others were allowed to be left blank or unanswered and others allowed multiple answers. When multiple answers were permitted, the total number of responses for that question is shown.

The general summary is that most respondents were individual developers with 2 or more years of add-on development experience. Natually, they felt comfortable with JavaScript and XUL. They primarily built add-ons for Firefox and hosted them on their own (possibly, in additional to AMO).

These are simply the raw results, we’ll be applying some correlation analysis to draw out more interesting findings and conclusions.

Q1: Which of these best describes your status?

Q2. When did you write your first add-on? (for Firefox or other applications)

Q3. Select the applications (or devices) for which you have created add-ons, 3rd party applications, or plugins.

Q4. How many distinct add-ons have you created? (for Firefox or other applications)

Q5. Was the functionality of your Firefox add-on similar to your add-on for other applications?

Q6. If you have ever started to develop an add-on and then aborted the project, what were the primary factors in your decision to stop development?

Q7. What tool(s) did you use to develop your add-on(s) (for Firefox or other applications) ?

Q8. What tools would help you develop more efficiently?

Q9. How would you rate the ease of development of Firefox add-ons?

Q10. How would you rate Mozilla’s developer documentation?

Q11. How familiar are you with JavaScript and XUL?

Q12-Q14. What were the top three challenging aspects of building your add-on?

Q15. Where do you host your add-on?

ShareThis

So, if you are an add-on author or themer, please fill out the survey. We’ll be summarizing the results in a few weeks.

(Colophon: We have attempted to use Google Docs “Form Fill” feature to collect this data into a spreadsheet – will let you know how that goes for us.)

ShareThis