User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041019 Firefox/1.0 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041019 Firefox/1.0 Users should not have to go through the usability nightmare that is update.mozilla.org in order to find extensions and themes. Rather there should be a MAB-esque chrome-based window connected to the extension/theme managers that uses a web service (similar to the extension/application update mechanism that is in place now) to update the data there. That way users don't have to navigate through u.m.o in order to find their extension- when they search it can pull data straight through the web service, lowering Mozilla.org's bandwith usage, and make it easier for users to figure out how to get extensions. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Try to get a new user to get an extension Actual Results: It's hard Expected Results: It's easy and should be through a chrome window

iirc there was an extension for that in 0.8 times. Don't remember how it was called or if it is working now, but you might want to go that way, as I don't think it will be implemented in Firefox soon (if ever).

I love how the solution to "usability of X sucks" is almost invariably "lets do Y instead" in 96% of bug reports. It'd be a much bigger win to improve u.m.o's usability since 1.0 obviously won't ship with this, and will be out in the wild for a very long time. Not to say this doesn't have merit, I just don't agree that the right fix is to change concepts completely.

(In reply to comment #2) How about something on the main page and/or download page that says: "Make sure you check out https://update.mozilla.org/extensions for really cool ways to improve your browsing experience. The most downloaded extensions right now are: <the extensions and their descriptions>" I'm sure that there will be people who will see this and say: "I didn't know it is possible to block these annoying ads (or whatever). These extension things really rock!"

(In reply to comment #2) > I love how the solution to "usability of X sucks" is almost invariably "lets do > Y instead" in 96% of bug reports. I think that u.m.o is the wrong approach to getting extensions. Yes we should have a central place to get them, that was the whole idea of u.m.o. However, I think that making users navigate through a website should not be the way that users get extensions. It's just not the right paradigm - I think that we should be using rather a very small amount of chrome to link into the u.m.o database. Sure we can also keep u.m.o for people to look at what's there and also use it if they want, but the easiest way to get extensions would be through chrome with search and everything. I think what we should try to emulate with this is jEdit's plugin central window. not that we should try to emulate jEdit, but its central plugin manager window is excellent and fantastic. It's great how you can see the information about the plugins right there, we could have a screenshot too and all sorts of stuff like download numbers. All we would need is an exposed web service that firefox gets data from, and using that firefox could get the extensions. > It'd be a much bigger win to improve u.m.o's usability since 1.0 obviously won't > ship with this, and will be out in the wild for a very long time. Not to say > this doesn't have merit, I just don't agree that the right fix is to change > concepts completely. I agre that we should also improve u.m.o's usability - and I would love to help out with this, except that u.m.o's code isn't in tree (as far as I can tell). I have a lot of ideas on how to make it better but ultimately I think that we should have it be through chrome. That way we can also utilize the same thing in thunderbird and not force people to download and *then* install extensions for TB, they can just click a button in the TB extension manager window. Yes it wouldn't get to the majority of people for a while but taht doesn't mean taht we can't start working on it... Jason

Sorry about the bugspam, I should have attached this to the other comment- this is a screenshot of the jEdit plugin manager that I think that we should try to emulate, at least in purpose if not in form. I think we can do a better job than this, but it's good to look at. Jason

Actually it would be also nice if there was an u.m.o variant based on remote xul. This would have almost the same as 'chome' variant originally suggested, as u.m.o doesn't really need any special chrome priviledges. Problem is, there are few people working on u.m.o and *nobody* working on xul-based access to umo from firefox. Jason, I think you should contact Wolf (for example via irc) and tell him you want to help. But the whole discussion in this bug is pretty pointless. I suggest moving it to forums at mozillazine or to newsgroups.

(In reply to comment #0) > Users should not have to go through the usability nightmare that is > update.mozilla.org in order to find extensions and themes. Rather there should Try this: http://andkon.com/stuf/mozillableeding/design/selector.html

In reply to <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268172#c6">#6</a> You still have to go to u.m.o to get the theme.

> iirc there was an extension for that in 0.8 times. Actually there have been at least 2 different extensions implementing exactly this, picking & installing extensions directly via chrome. I used to use them all the time. It litterally boggles my mind that this has not yet been added by default to Firefox. It's a much faster & more intuitive way to do it then the current update site mess. In fact I don't know why there was so much effort put into creating the update site to begin with instead of just polishing up either of these existing (already many many months ago) tools and include it by default.

rc comment 9: would you be so kind to provide links or at least name those extensions?

Was bored and decided to do a mock-up that looks like something that you'd might find in Firefox/TB. Two other columns that I thought about while typing was home page/rating. rating in a number rating as 4.75/5 or something like that. BTW don't mind my leet paintshop skills, especially the crappy "selected" highlight hehe

I honestly think that very soon (if not already) there are going to be too many extensions listed at AMO to make such a function usable, even if the extensions were actually categorised sensibly.

Expanding a little bit on my last mockup. Removed the column for category, added mockup of "pages" on the left you can type in a page number, on the right you can go forward/back by one, added tabs for each category at the top, added arrows for sorting each page by either A->Z or Z-A. Also I guess with the mockup I propose, there would have to be version sniffing for output to make sure that only the extensions/themes for that version of Firefox/Thunderbird will show. Bonus on having tabs and pages is saves both the user and amo a hell of a lot of bandwidth instead of loading 3000 extensions...only first 20 (or whatever) will show for each tab.

I'm going to call this fixed by bug 404024