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Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

"I'm sure i'll switch once Mozilla gets its add-ons and plugins together into a store"

Honestly, it's just not the same. I know Mozilla agrees, because my friend is in charge of bringing out a better "App store" for Firefox. It's not enough to appeal to the developer crowd, who's willing to search hard for what they want - you have to do the Apple and Chrome thing, and appeal to people who are not technophiles, and just want a browser with cool tools.

Out of interest, what's the difference? The chrome store looks a bit nicer (although it's a pain to navigate IMO) - but I don't really see much difference in terms of functionality. The search is just as good on the Firefox store.

Perhaps its integration within the browser, or marketing - I'm not sure. But again, it's not a matter of assessing each feature and comparing the two, because that's what developers do. It's a matter of appealling to the non-developer community using the internet (much larger than the developer community, unfortunately).

It's not clear enough what the difference between these things are:

* Add-ons

* Extensions

* Plug-ins

* Themes

* Appearance

* Personas

(Note: I'm not asking for an explanation, I'm pointing out a problem)

Same applies to Chrome too, to an extent:

  - Extensions
  - Apps
  - Plugins
  - Themes

I think with Chrome, aside from Plugins, it's pretty clear. Extensions add stuff to the browser, Apps are applications, and Themes make the browser pretty (or ugly).

Integration into the browser is definitely an issue. Addons are hidden away in a menu and non-techies are definitely less likely to find them. I hope this will change soon as Firefox rolls out the new tab page. It would be nice to have something similar to Chrome with a page you can scroll across to for extensions.

I'm still confused as to why this made you switch, however, as I'm sure you're capable of installing addons in either browser. Still, each to their own :-)

Tools->Addons->Get Addons has the addon site inside the browser.

Actually, I honestly originally switched because I thought ctrl+shift+n was a smarter hotkey to open a private navigation window than ctrl+shift+p, as it is in Firefox. After that, Firefox just didn't do anything to win me back. It's small, but there 99% identical anyway - i's like Chimps and Humans.

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