Fx Add-ons Overhaul Pt 2

[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 3.5][Part 4][Part 4.5]

As I mentioned Saturday, Mozilla is overhauling the Firefox Add-ons site. Earlier today Mozilla had made available a preview of the new and (not) improved Firefox Add-ons site. Besides removing a huge chunk of add-ons such as Clear Cache Button, CacheViewer, SeachLoad Options, Stylish, CoLT, Infolister, Linky, AJAX Yahoo! Mail, DisableBackspaceNavigation, Restarter, Smiley Xtra, Spellbound, Splash, Stop Autoplay, TinyURL Creator, Update Channel Changer and WeatherBug to name a few, I’ve noticed these changes thus far:

• URL format for the extensions has changed because of the multi-language support (English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, French and a couple others)
• Future options to review and discuss the add-ons
• New dictionaries section allows you add additional dictionaries to your Firefox 2 Spellchecker. Current selection includes French and nothing else.
• Easier access to install older versions of add-ons
• Extension home page now in developer’s profile

There was one thing I had sure wish they would had “fixed”, the search. The current search to put it mildly, sucks. As if this were possible they’ve managed to make the new search even worse! Simply put, no more advanced search :( . So, now you are stuck with 10 results per page (although you can change this after you searched) AND the results are STILL by default are sorted by most recently updated (you can not change this). Wouldn’t displaying the results by name be more logical? Of course so would giving the users some more search options.

Now I really, really hope they are going to setup the old URL’s to auto redirect to the new URL’s. The old URL’s were formated as (addons.mozilla.org/firefox/) the new URL’s are formated as (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/addons/display/). This change is going to cause major problems for those of us who have posted the “old” URL’s in blogs, forums, web sites, etc. At this time all we can do is wait and see what really happens. After all that site was only a “preview” which Mozilla has removed and the old (current) site is still the same.

Update: The “preview” site is a work in progress and has actually been up (and down) for several weeks. The current extension list is NOT all inclusive, more may be added prior to the final release.