User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0

Steps to reproduce:

went to about:addons

Actual results:

the author name is a hyperlink to the add-on's AMO page

Expected results:

the title of the add-on should take me to the addon's AMO page while the author should take me to the author's AMO page

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to submit this issue. Although it is reproducing on Windows 10 x64bit and MacOS 10.14 with Nightly 83.0a1 (20201004212809), Beta 82.0b7 (20201002191150), and Release 81.0.1 (20200930150533), this behavior may be intended. The report can be an enhancement idea, for the developers team to consider.

While this isn't a "bug", it's not an "enhancement idea" either. I think it's more of an oversight as it's not intended.

It's just difficult to use and it's a headscratcher that this made it through with Firefox's relatively new redesign for the add-ons manager.

Will pass by UX. Note that the author link goes different places from disco pane vs. details page

The fact that it links to the details page is intentional (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564305#c2).
This was a trade-off between consistency and usefulness, where I opted for a link to the add-on page because users are more likely to look for that.

The design may be confusing though. I'll leave this bug open for now to allow UX to review this if they have the chance.
Should we turn the header in a link to the details page (and link to the user profile from the author link)?

Yes please! :D

I don't really understand why this decision had to me made

We will add some AMO link in the extension details page, ux still thinking about the recommended extensions page.

We will make the recommendations cards work the same as they do in the extensions list. The card is highlighted (with border) on hover, and clicking the card takes you to more details. In the case of recommendations, that details page is the AMO page. We'll remove the link on the author in this card.

I think that the author label is useful enough to be kept. We can still remove the link though, and direct the card to AMO upon click.

I'm marking this as a good-first-bug. Especially relevant for those who are interested in the Outreachy project.

To resolve this bug:

• Remove click from https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/919607a3610222099fbfb0113c98b77888ebcbfb/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/aboutaddons.js#3461-3466
• Navigate to AMO in a new tab (e.g. with openUILinkIn) at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/919607a3610222099fbfb0113c98b77888ebcbfb/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/aboutaddons.js#3533-3543
• Let the recommended-addon-card card have a :hover appearance similar to https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/919607a3610222099fbfb0113c98b77888ebcbfb/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/aboutaddons.css#224
• Run mach test toolkit/mozapps/extensions/test/browser/ to see which tests break after making the above changes, and fix them as needed. Make sure that the new logic is covered by unit tests.

Hi there, I'm an addon recommender maintainer. I believe this tiny UX enhancement/bugfix must be very valuable and we should fix it as soon as we can. The thing is we're making it quite hard for users to follow the recommendations. My assumption is that few users are ready to install random addons without checking them out and it's not clear at all that it is possible now.

I don't mind that we have an extra link to the developer page, but there should be a clear and simple way for a user to check out the addon page before following the recommendation to install.

Just for the context: addon recommender (TAAR, https://github.com/mozilla/taar) is a heavy ML project with a lot of effort put into it, so it would be a waste to undermine it with confusing UX.

Please increase the priority if possible. Thanks!

I've put a little bit more thought into this. Making the whole card clickable to open the addons listing in a new page is not ideal, because that behavior differs from the usual behavior:

• On the Extensions and Themes list in about:addons, clicking on an installed add-on results directs the user to a detailed overview within the same page.
• On AMO, clicking on an add-on card (e.g. a search result) results in a navigation to the details page in the same tab.

If comment 11 were to be implemented, a new tab would be opened in a different site. This card is also shown in the extension list, and this difference in behavior may be confusing (and possibly even discourage the user from clicking on an already-installed add-on).

I think that instead of comment 11, we should just append a link (e.g. (<a>details</a>) ) after the author link. That would not be as ambiguous.

This should be run by UX before committing to any implementation, so I think the gfb label should be removed.

(In reply to Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him) from comment #14)

This should be run by UX before committing to any implementation, so I think the gfb label should be removed.

Is the proposal from comment 13 (last line) so large that we want to block on UX feedback? Recently there was an announcement to not involve UX for small questions at https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/q8w3uojCyP4

It's large in that it involves Recommendations, which is a very high-value feature in the Add-ons Manager. We shouldn't be making changes to it without careful consideration.

(edit: I only meant to add to the whiteboard)

IMO even a simple fix would be a multiplier of our TAAR efforts and bring a lot of value, but if UX team can take a look, it would be awesome!

Thank you Rob and Jorge, I appreciate your help with this!