Ask HN: Why has Firefox not really moved forward with the UX of its addon store? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why has Firefox not really moved forward with the UX of its addon store?

1 pointnstart5 comments

The team working on Firefox is doing an incredible job pushing their browser forward. I've been a staunch supporter of their work for years. But one thing I don't get it how old the addon store feels. I see chrome add-ons rising to the front page on product hunt and almost never see them being ported over to Firefox despite it actually being decently simple enough to do so (doesn't apply everywhere of course but a lot of core logic is very similar). Even disregarding ports, I don't remember seeing anything major in show HN threads or anywhere else about some amazing new addon.

My point is, add-ons are actually a big deal (as evidenced by platforms like product hunt). But Firefox feels like it's neglecting a very obvious market. And I'm very curious why that is.

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From one staunch supporter of Mozilla to another:

1. Chrome was first to the easy JS addons game. Firefox is playing catch up there with Web Extensions. Did Firefox basically invent the browser extension? Yeah. But Chrome made it popular and easy to develop

2. Developers are largely moving towards Chrome as their sole browser for testing. Therefore, addons get developed for Chrome first. You also might be experiencing sample bias on the other end of that: PH and HN are developer focused, so Chrome gets more front-page love.

> Developers are largely moving towards Chrome as their sole browser for testing

That's the most depressing thing I've read this week. I'm not saying it's not correct, but it's fucking ridiculous.

We just got to a point where there are multiple competitive rendering engines (i.e. they keep each other honest) and front end developers say "eh, fuck it, if it works in chrome thats enough".

To the developers who have either a stated, or unstated view of "<site> works best in Chrome": fuck you very much.

Re the bias bit, I do keep checking the featured section of the Firefox extensions. For the longest while, it's been YouTube flash-html5, YouTube all html5, chatzilla, multi links plus. Oh and Gmail notifier.

The chrome extensions on the other hand.

Speedtest, sharepad (notepad extension), an extension to search for any spoken word in a video (nice!), an extension that highlights vertical rhythm in a web page (cool). I wouldn't say they've seen a lot of variation either but they have some cool tools and that's just the extensions.

I do get that I'm probably seeing announcements only on chrome related stuff though. But I wish Firefox would make up for it by tweaking their store to help us find fresh stuff.

Chrome is more heavily advertised since it's maintained by a tech corporation with lots of resources. And Chrome is also being preloaded onto a lot of Windows machines by OEMs, so that's also pushing adoption.

Meanwhile, Firefox is relying on the same advertising it always has relied on: word of mouth. The reason Firefox became popular was because the only other choice at the time was IE 6 (which already had a bad reputation at the time). Now, with Chrome out and receiving regular updates, users have little incentive to not use the browser that "everyone else" is using.

> Chrome is more heavily advertised since it's maintained by an advertising corporation with lots of resources

Fixed that for you.

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