Promoted Add-ons Pilot Wrap-up | Hacker News Reader

Promoted Add-ons Pilot Wrap-up

blog.mozilla.org

18 pointsTedDoesntTalk14 comments

"After reviewing the pilot results, we have decided not to move forward with this iteration of the program. Later this month the Verified badges for pilot participants will be deactivated and the Sponsored shelf on the AMO homepage removed."

Good. It came across as an extortion scheme. "Pay us money or we put a nasty message up to prevent people from downloading your add-on". I started to sign up, read the terms, and rejected the program, sent in a message to Mozilla add-on support telling them why.

Their old system, where you requested review and it took a few weeks, was fine. The slow speed tended to keep out scammers.

I think there are two sides to this. The fact that the add-ons are hosted on Mozilla's own website lends far too much credibility to what is some randos code. There really should be more alarm bells to make sure people understand that they're basically curl | firefox-ing.

Irrespective of the program to remove that message by paying Mozilla to review your code they should still keep the warnings.

You are confusing "Recommended extensions" program with this one. The recommended extensions program is free and is still continuing.

Mine was added to it without me signing any terms.

I was part of the pilot [0], and enjoyed the process. It didn't cost anything, and they only requested random surveys on the service.

My extension just sets the default search engine to Runnaroo, and I don't promote it much because people can just do that through the browser, but it was nice to get some increased exposure and I did notice an uptick in downloads, especially initially.

In general, I'm all for Mozilla testing different monetization strategies to offset some of their reliance on Google.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/runnaroo/

Actually, how do you set Firefox's search engine to something which isn't already in the default list of options, without an add-on?

I couldn't figure out how to change it to Startpage without installing Startpage's add-on.

You can use open search -- if you load a page that provides an open search description of itself (such as startpage.com) and then click on the "Page actions" menu (the 3 dots in the url bar), one of the options there is "Add search engine". One you've added it, you can open about:preferences and set it to the default from there. Perhaps not the smoothest experience but it is possible...

I'm curious how many more installs the extensions received from being promoted. My weather extension has been part of Firefox's recommended program for some time and has seen some growth but not substantial. I do like that people can trust that the "recommended" extensions are reviewed more heavily and in general are safer extensions. Honored they included my extensions and offer this option.

Link to weather extension if anyone is interested: https://weatherextension.com/

Amazing to see people leave money on the table for good for the users.

Submitters: please don't editorialize titles—this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (Submitted title was "Firefox: Paying Mozilla to promote your extension has failed". We've changed it to what the article says.)

Well, yes, but it is a press release spinning a failure.

We can all read that for ourselves, you don't need to editorialize.

Ah ok—that's relevant. We try to avoid corporate press release language—this is a whole subdomain of moderation:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Is there a clearer source we could change the URL to? That's the best solution. Failing that, I'm open to changing the title again if someone comes up with an accurate and neutral one.

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