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The Firefox Add-ons site, particularly the extensions side is undergoing a major overhaul this weekend.
“Mozilla Corp. will relaunch its popular Firefox add-on site Monday by culling the several thousand extensions listed for its open-source browser to just a couple of hundred.
Rather than list all the available Firefox and Thunderbird extensions — Shaver estimated that there are approximately 2,000 available now — the site will drop marginal add-ons, as well as those no longer maintained by their creator or not updated for the browsers and e-mail clients now in use. A couple of hundred extensions will remain on the site after Monday.”
Now, I am curious as to what it is meant by “not updated for the browsers and e-mail clients now in use” in reference to Firefox. I am hoping this means that extensions that don’t support Fx 1.5 or above will be removed, not extensions which don’t support Fx 2. If Mozilla were to remove non Fx 2 compliant extensions would be a very bad move for two reasons. First, may people are still using Fx 1.5 only because they would rather wait for the Major Update then upgrade themselves. In addition, Mozilla said they would continue to support Fx 1.5 for six months (April 24th) after the release of Fx 2.
So removal of non Fx 2 extensions would seem foolish on Mozilla’s part. I haven’t really looked but I guess there must be many extensions which were only designed for the 1.0.X builds and never updated to 1.5.0.X or 2.0.0.X builds. Monday should be very interesting and also could prove very aggravating if they change the locations again for the extensions.
A final thought, if I could have one wish for a change to the Firefox Add-ons site, it would be changing the default sort order of search results back to name, instead of the current recently updated.
News Source: ComputerWorld
