With all of the work that has gone into the new add-ons manager for Firefox 4 I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look back at the history of this part of Firefox and a quick look at what the future may hold.

# Phoenix 0.2

Even in the earliest versions of Firefox, extensions were supported using the old XPInstall style packages. These had some pretty fundamental problems though in that there was no built in support for uninstalling extensions nor any way to disable them. There wasn’t even an extension manager window to see what you had installed at first. The very first time that a list of extensions and themes appeared in Firefox was way back in version 0.2, back when the product was called Phoenix. It was a very basic user interface and appeared inside the preferences window.

# Firebird 0.6

After the product got a rename to Firebird the next incarnation of the manager split the themes and extensions into separate parts of the preferences window.

# Firefox 0.9

Everything changed when Firefox 0.9 came along with its standalone extension manager window and support for the new install.rdf packages which are essentially unchanged from the extension packages that are used today.

Themes and extensions were displayed in different windows and a basic update service was in place, to be improved in the backend code for Firefox 1.0. This first version was mainly written by Ben Goodger

# Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 saw very few differences on the surface of the extension manager, some slight changes to the visual styling along with the rest of Firefox.

Behind the scenes, Darin Fisher made large changes. He allowed the manager to support loading extensions from different locations on the system including the Windows registry. He also created the ability to just extract extensions into the profile folder, which would be detected automatically the next time Firefox ran. Rob Strong then took over ownership of the manager to get it stable for release. This also saw my first patch to the extension manager, the rather insignificant bug 307925.

# Firefox 2.0

Firefox 2.0 finally combined the separate extensions and theme windows into the unified add-ons manager.

Underneath more changes were going on including the first blocklist service to allow us to remotely disable extensions that were found to be harmful to users. Since its creation we have very rarely used this feature but when it has been used it has helped prevent security exploits and crashes.

# Firefox 3.0

With Firefox 3 we started including Plugins in the add-ons manager window and for the first time you could download and install add-ons from addons.mozilla.org directly within the add-ons manager. This was the first big feature that I worked on in Firefox and I’m always pretty happy when I hear from the add-ons team just how much it is used.

Internally the blocklist got upgraded to support blocking plugins and new install locations were added for platforms other than Windows to support integration with other applications on the system.

# Firefox 3.5 and 3.6

No real visual changes happened in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 however Firefox 3.5 improved the blocklist service yet again, allowing for a couple of different levels of severity while Firefox 3.6 added support for warning users about outdated plugins on their system and brought the fledgling Personas into the manager allowing quick switching between simple backgrounds for the main Firefox window.

# Firefox 4.0 beta

Firefox 4 is seeing a complete redesign of the add-ons manager adding support for extensions that don’t require restarts, an automatic update system with less interruptions to the user and a more useful way to discover new add-ons.

Behind the scenes the new add-ons manager is now capable of managing new types of add-ons more easily than it was possible before.

# Firefox 4.0

The user experience team are hard at work making the final designs for how the add-ons manager will look in the final Firefox 4 release. While only preliminary this is a quick idea of the sort of thing that they are going for:

In the future we have plans to bring more types of add-ons into the main manager. Things like search plugins which currently are managed by their own custom window can fit in here. We also want to simplify customizing your extensions. Although it is unlikely we would stop allowing extension developers to create their own preferences windows we are looking into adding support for changing simple settings directly in the add-ons manager rather than needing to open new window. We’re hopeful that we can set up more automated ways of updating your installed plugins which are often the cause of security and stability problems and we want to significantly improve theme selection to make it easier to see what themes are available and switch between them.

It’s possible that some of these things may even happen in time for Firefox 4.0 but time is running short to get new things in before the final release.