Basil's Bodacious Blog

I’ve made the very difficult decision to leave Mozilla Corporation to pursue another employment opportunity. It has been an amazing 2.5 years and it saddens me that I will not be interacting as deeply with the Mozilla community. Yet, I expect to remain active as I’m huge supporter of the Mozilla project’s mission and goals.

Mozilla’s efforts are so critical to the vibrancy of the Internet and it sits at the nexus of a million exciting developments. So, I remain a big fan and will do what I can to continue to participate.

Thank you for the tremendous feedback about add-ons and AMO. Working publicly, radically, openly has forever changed how I manage and run projects. The torch has been handed to Mike Morgan (Morgamic) who has kindly agreed to take on general responsibility for AMO. Meanwhile, Rey Bango, our AMO Community Mobilizer continues his excellent work with add-on developers and editor outreach.

Rock On! Add-ons.

We recently conducted a survey of the add-on developer community. This post summarizes the quantitative results and some key findings only. There were several open-ended questions included on the survey. A special thank you to all those respondents that provided us with extensive feedback and great ideas. A summary of developer comments and suggestions will follow at a later date.

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?

The Mozilla add-ons team is always looks for insights in order to improve the development experience and toolset for add-ons authors. We have put together a Add-on Developer Survey that tries to capture some of that with a short series of questions. There is also ample room for free form comments and feedback which we will read intently.

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.)

As we near the end the month of August, we have rotated the featured add-ons on the AMO site. I’ve previously described the process we use on AMO for rotating the featured and recommended add-ons.

Some of the new entrants to the recommended list include a few of the Extend Firefox 3 contest winners such as: Pencil, Tagmarks, Read It Later and Fire.fm.

Check out the AMO featured add-on list for the end of August 2008.

The AMO team has issued a small maintenance release for AMO (v3.4.7). Full fix list is available here.

There were some fantastic entries this time around for the Extend Firefox 3 Contest and the winners have been announced. You’ll find most of the add-ons hosted on AMO. Make sure to checkout and congratulate these authors for a job well done. Lifehacker also has a roundup of the contest.

At the recent Firefox Plus Summit, I missed the opportunity to share my slides for the AMO session due to a power outage. Ended up using lots of hand gestures and flip charts. For those interested, I’ve uploaded them here and welcome any questions or comments.

(Also, uploaded the slides from the AMO Editor’s session).

Thanks.

We have created a new mailing list/newsgroup/Google group to be used for discussion of AMO software development, policies and processes. To clarify the role of this list relative to some of the others out there, it’s meant for AMO development discussion, enhancement requests, policies, and so on.

• Add-on development questions should go to the extensions mailing list/newsgroup.
• User support for working with Firefox and add-ons should go to Mozilla Support or the Firefox Support list
• User support for particular add-ons, should go to add-on author’s support forums or email addresses

The software used to run AMO is open sourced under the Mozilla Public Licensed (MPL) and is maintained under the following SVN repository.

We welcome contribution to the AMO project in the form of discussions, enhancement requests, bug filings and patches.

You can receive the articles in one of three ways:

a) If you are interested in joining the mailing list and receiving email, you can visit https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo, click on dev-amo and subscribe yourself to the list.

b) If you wish to read/subscribe by reading articles on the web, you can use Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.amo.

c) If you wish to use a dedicated news reader, you can point your news reader to news.mozilla.org, look for new newsgroups and subscribe to mozilla.dev.amo.

As we near the end the month of July, we have rotated the featured add-ons on the site. I’ve previously described the process we use on AMO for rotating the featured add-ons. Those add-ons with better overall performance stay on the list, the remaining slots are used to introduce some new add-ons and re-feature ones that were previously removed.

This rotation removed 17 add-ons and added 18. Some of the new entrants included: Ctrl-Tab, TokBox Voice and Video Call, Fast Video Download, TimeTracker & GMail Notifier.

Check out the resulting list for End of July 2008.

We pushed out a minor revision to AMO last night. This includes:

• A “Remember me on this computer” option when logging in so that you are not constantly being asked for your password. The login credential expires every 2 weeks.
• A reCAPTCHA process for new registrations.
• Changes to the default sort order for search results making them more relevant. Now, exact name matches are shown first followed by other matching results.
• Preview sliders for recommended add-ons on the category landing pages
• Some fixes to some key problems we’ve been facing recently, e.g. inability to upload add-ons under certain conditions.

Checkout the AMO 3.4.6 fix list for a full breakdown.