1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
and click on “Register” to sign up for a Mozilla account and confirm it from your email account.

2. Click on “Login” to login and then click on “My Account” which will take you to the web page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/users/edit

3. The fifth option in the Firefox Profiles page is “Show sandbox?”. Check this box to enable the sandbox and then click on “Save”

4. Now you can browse, search and install extensions that are in the Mozilla Extensions Sandbox. Go here to see a list of extensions in the sandbox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/home/status:1

I really like the fact that someone can come up with a simple original idea that really works and get it up and available and clearly visible before the copycats hit. Hope that will still be the case.

Even when an extension becomes obsolete and it’s features are builtin there is still things to be seen in the documentation which is sometimes better, and often was a lot more robust and had more planning than the builtin version by a different developer. I would not like to see such documentation and old extensions actually disappear.

There has always been different levels of acceptance, and places to find extensions:
http://addons.mozilla.org the place to be,
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/ next best,

and author sites & blogs with extensions,
and user informaton webpages (such as mine) & blogs.

I hope that the ratings within the sandbox do not become popularity contests. You can look at ratings on accepted addons and see that a zero rating by someone who can’t read can really affect ratings, and many negatives are misinterpretations or corrected but the ratings are still affected permanently.

I understand that it was needed to change the reviewing system to deal with the increasing number of extensions. And I appreciate the hard work put into the whole Mozila project in general and into addons.mozilla.org in particular.

If extension developers are unhappy with the new site, they will just put their extension somewhere else. Please don’t forget that they, too, are unpaid volunteers and deserve some consideration.

I really don’t like the new system as it is currently implemented. It seems that only registered users can access the Sandbox and they need special actions to enable and then go the Sandbox. I cannot see how my extension will ever get any review with this system, unless I send email to the many happy users I received mails from and ask them to subscribe, enable the Sandbox, find Nostalgy, submit a review. At least with the old system, people felt responsible for accepting/rejecting extensions. Now, nobody is in charge, and the site really gives no incentive to become a reviewer.

My suggestion would be to allow anyone to see extensions in the Sandbox by default, with no specific action at all. The search engine should return results from the Sandbox, and only display them with a scary theme and tell the users to be careful, to try the extension at their own risk, and *to submit a review if they like/dislike the extension*. Maybe a sandboxed extension could even require the user to be logged in, in order to be downloaded, but please show the description page to everyone!

Other things I don’t like:

- broken links to old extension pages: it doesn’t seem so hard to put a page explaining the new Sandbox system instead, does it?

- comments seems to have been deleted; I really hope they’ll be back. How do you expect new users to try an extension if they cannot even see comments?

What I really like is the idea of browsing the source code directly from the site. (However, at least for my extension, the javascript sources are not shown.)