The new add-ons manager is here
Posted: April 29th, 2010
Finally, after far too much time, the new add-ons manager is about to land in trunk nightlies. I am putting together the final patches to land now. The bit most people will see is the new UI so I guess I’ll steal Boriss’ image for you to look at here with the same caveats. What you see on trunk over the next few days is just the initial steps to switching to a redesigned UI and (more importantly from my point of view) a totally new extension manager backend that will make it easier for us to improve and build upon in the future. The changes are so large that it is important to get more people testing it now while it still looks fairly unpolished so we can pick up problems that we’ve missed.
New Add-ons Manager UI
Tomorrow (Friday) the QA team are holding a test day on the new add-ons manager, if you want to help test for issues you can join us in #testday on irc.mozilla.org
We are filing bugs with [rewrite] in the status whiteboard and blocking either the backend tracking bug or the UI tracking bug. So you can check the dependency tree to see what issues we already know about and plan to take care of. Please file bugs for anything else you see, especially when it is something that is wrong compared to Firefox 3.6.
There will be some add-ons broken in the new builds. This is fairly normal for any API update. As a general rule if some add-ons work but others don’t then contacting the authors of those broken add-ons is the best idea.
Developers of other applications may find things broken, ultimately this is unavoidable when changing APIs on this scale, please contact me if you need some help getting things working again.
Tags: addons, development, extension manager, firefox
Categories: mozilla
Meet the new Firefox Add-ons Manager • Mozilla Links says:
[...] Changes are not limited to the UI but there’s also “a totally new extension manager backend that will make it easier for us to improve and build upon in the future.”, noted Dave Townsend on a blog post. [...]
Yes, you will certainly break things. But it is more than worth it – the new API is a huge step forward, I know that particularly developers of other applications will appreciate it. I for my part made sure that Adblock Plus 1.2 (which will be released today) is compatible with both the old and the new API (ok, the versions before it don’t even use the extension manager API
. I also started work towards allowing Adblock Plus to install/uninstall without restarts.
Thank you for all your hard work!
Looks great so far.
It would be great if it showed theme preview images somehow (perhaps, after clicking ‘Show more’) and wouldn’t hide extension website url under ‘Show more’.
Looks good, though the version number seems to be missing for extensions.
For people using the l10n nightlies, those are busted due to bug 562877 and/or 562876.
I would move “languages” right down to the bottom – people are likely to need to change their language once, it shouldn’t have priority over things like extensions.
I think “search engines” should probably move further down too, either just above or just below “plugins”. People aren’t as likely to install search engines on as regular a basis as addons or themes.
Oh I’ve just spotted the “% of RAM/CPU” – does that mean we’re getting something like Chrome’s task manager?
RAM / CPU absolutely need to be separated out into two categories – most people really do understand the distinction here (as opposed to many other hardware metrics) and being able to find which addon is using all your memory (lots of people still complain about memory usage) or which addon is making Firefox use all your CPU are two very distinct things.
New Firefox Add-ons Manager Coming In Next Version says:
[...] trunk nightly build of Firefox has landed with the much-awaited overhaul to the Add-ons Manager. Dave Townsend has managed to put together the final patches and calls it, “a totally new extension manager [...]
Firefox gets a sexy new addons manager « MobileTrends.info says:
[...] Tools took me three attempts — but that’s to be expected with a code addition like this says Mozilla’s Dave Townsend. One quick usage note: the new Manager utilizes JavaScript, so if you’ve got NoScript [...]
Mozilla Previews New Firefox Add-Ons Manager says:
[...] The Mozilla team is hard at work on the next update to Firefox, which will include a fully redesigned Add-ons Manager.Previously, the Add-ons Manager operated in its own separate window apart from the rest of the [...]
Mozilla Previews New Firefox Add-Ons Manager | Marthee's Tech News says:
[...] The Mozilla team is hard at work on the next update to Firefox, which will include a fully redesigned Add-ons Manager.Previously, the Add-ons Manager operated in its own separate window apart from the rest of the [...]
Dave, what about the addons manager in xulrunner ?
The new add-ons manager will appear in XULRunner too. Applications can either open it in a tab if that makes sense for them or it should still open in a new window if necessary
With the newest Minefield nightly is there a way to disable extension compatibility checking? The usual way of adding/changing the key “extensions.checkCompatibility” no longer works. There are some extensions that may not be compatible but I’d like to test anyway.
Setting extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7a should work just as before
Thanks for the quick reply. I guess the problem is that some of my extensions are broken and no longer work with the newest nightly.
Nyt udseende til håndtering af tilføjelser « MozillaDanmarks blog says:
[...] Designere og usability-eksperter arbejder på højtryk på de kommende versioner af Firefox. Sådan har brugerfladen til at håndtere udvidelser fx set ud siden i torsdags: [...]
El nuevo gestor de addons de Mozilla says:
[...] información: Blog de Dave Townsend [...]
Firefox con nuevo gestor addon - Foro Windows says:
[...] [...]
El nuevo gestor de addons de Mozilla | Software y web. PegamentoDigital. says:
[...] información: Blog de Dave Townsend [...]
Firefox incluirá un nuevo gestor de addons : Noticias2D says:
[...] nueva versión llegará en los próximos meses a nuestros ordenadores, ya sea en Windows, Linux o Mac OS [...]
Conoce el nuevo administrador de complementos de Firefox « Mozilla Links en español says:
[...] Los cambios no sólo están limitados a la interfaz, sino que además hay un “cambio profundo al código del nuevo administrador de extensiones que hará que sea más sencillo para nosotros mejorarlo en el futuro”, según nos cuenta Dave Townsend en su blog [en]. [...]
Las Noticias Online » Archivo del Blog » Firefox incluirá un nuevo gestor de addons says:
[...] nueva versión llegará en los próximos meses a nuestros ordenadores, ya sea en Windows, Linux o Mac OS X. Escribe un [...]
Conoce el nuevo administrador de complementos de Firefox | Experiencia Digital.es says:
[...] Los cambios no sólo están limitados a la interfaz, sino que además hay un “cambio profundo al código del nuevo administrador de extensiones que hará que sea más sencillo para nosotros mejorarlo en el futuro”, según nos cuenta Dave Townsend en su blog [en]. [...]
Un nuovo Add-On Manager per Firefox | TUXJournal.net says:
[...] a noi sviluppatori di lavorare meglio in futuro”, ha dichiarato Dave Townsend sul suo blog. Ora non resta che attendere la fine della fase di test per vedere il nuovo Add-On Manager fare il [...]
Firefox renueva su administrador de extensiones | Bitelia says:
[...] editar los parámetros dentro de la misma interfaz.Además de los cambios visuales, también habrá modificaciones en la API, que tienen como objetivos ofrecer actualizaciones silenciosas (de manera optativa) y simplificar [...]
Firefox renueva su administrador de extensiones « Hashikto´s Blog says:
[...] de los cambios visuales, también habrá modificaciones en la API, que tienen como objetivos ofrecer actualizaciones silenciosas (de manera optativa) y simplificar [...]
Blog DDS.media says:
[...] de los cambios visuales, también habrá modificaciones en la API, que tienen como objetivos ofrecer actualizaciones silenciosas (de manera optativa) y simplificar [...]
Firefox con nuevo administrador de extensiones says:
[...] Enlaces: Extension Manager Redesign, Preguntas frecuentes, Test Plan, Oxymoronical [...]
Well its not working for me here. 3.7a5 on win 7. about:addons produces “The url is invalid and cannot be loaded”. And Minefield is fully updated. Oh well.
We new addon mananger was backed out from mozilla-central. (Due tu some failure on Mac I think.)
This one: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8a7a28c65fbd
Hey,
Thanks for the info. I hope it is back soon, it is a massive improvement.
Cheers.
Firefox gets a sexy new add-ons Manager | ankitpatelia says:
[...] The icon set and overall look isn’t finalized, but it’s certainly a good first effort and looks nice with the new theme which arrived back in February. Search engines have also been added to the Manager, though it didn’t recognize the Wolfram Alpha or (G)Mail:to search box addons I’ve got installed. Some add-ons also have a difficult time installing in the new drop — Nightly Tester Tools took me three attempts — but that’s to be expected with a code addition like this says Mozilla’s Dave Townsend. [...]
Meet the new Firefox Add-ons Manager | Intertech says:
[...] Changes are not limited to the UI but there’s also “a totally new extension manager backend that will make it easier for us to improve and build upon in the future.”, noted Dave Townsend on a blog post. [...]