Update:Remora Feedback

Alpha Feedback - http://preview.addons.mozilla.org

This page is for consolidation of the feedback on the new AMO Alpha. If you're more comfortable filing bugs, you're welcome to do that instead.

See also the announcement on the Mozilla webdev blog.

The feedback (bugs, suggestions) that we fixed/dealt with were moved to a reference page.

fligtar's comments

I like the overall look, but I have a few comments about certain aspects:

• The sidebar still doesn't show the active page with a gray background (li class="selected")
• The discussion header/footer is noticeably different.
• Discussions show a CakePHP favicon for me
• This may be a vanilla bug, not sure: "Comment by made 1 day ago days ago"
  • That was a l10n bug and is likely to be still present in different languages due to a l10n tag inconsistency in the vanilla code. I fixed it in English and German, though. --wenzel 18:44, 16 January 2007 (PST)

clouserw's comments

• Old URLs should redirect into the new format so we don't get 404s (bug 362526)
• If there are no addons in a category, an unfriendly/unstyled message is flashed, and the user is redirected to the front page. (bug 365853)
  • maybe these category links should not even be displayed if they don't carry any add-ons. --wenzel 20:59, 2 January 2007 (PST)
• Pages should validate
• Discussions can be started that aren't related to an addon (just click "discussions" in the header, then start a new topic)
• The "More..." link under "Popular Extensions" on the browse page goes nowhere.
• Since search engines are addons now, if you type a search engine id into the URL, you get a really ugly display page

wenzel's comments

• Browse Category page has a "more" link for new and updated add-ons which leads to the new add-ons RSS feed (atm it's even a 404); it should maybe lead to a new page showing the new add-ons for this category only.
• Browse Add-ons page could use category specific RSS feeds.
• Search algorithm is improvable: The binary matching creates many hits with the same score in spite of their obviously different relevance.
• "find similar add-ons" sometimes shows different categories with the same name? (example)

xeen's comments

• When browsing by category I don't know which category I am in ("Subscribe to this Category" isn't useful either. What about 'Subscribe to "XYZ"'?) (sancus)
• Categories with only 1 extension/theme directly link to the theme, which is confusing (sancus)
• "Other Add-ons" only lists extension names but doesn't offer a link to "traditional" browsing with summaries.
• Extension summaries should be limited to a certain length so that we don't have 2 pages description when browsing extensions. I kind-of see this when looking at the extension's page where the same description appears twice. Is this supposed to be "long" and "short" description?

dria's comments

• Seems to be a bug at [1] when not logged in. At very least there should be a significantly friendlier message suggesting the user log in :)

dolske's comments (from blog)

• How is browsing an extension category going to work? There seems to only be a limited subset of extensions on the preview site, so it’s hard to tell. It looks like a category page has 1 major featured extension, 2 minor featured extensions, and then just a list of other extension titles. It’s a bit hard to browse the current AMO, but a big block of title links seems too condensed.

jMax's comments (from blog)

• The add-on licenses should be exposed, so the user knows what he's about to install.

Gijs' (Hannibal's) comments

• There are small 'medals' next to extensions on the category pages. However, they don't have tooltips, are not links, and don't resurface on the actual addon page. What do they mean (and can we make that more clear in the actual addons UI)?
• Could we sort categories, so it becomes easier to find something specific? Right now there's just unsorted lists of about 12-15 items, which is not very easy to use.
• The "New and Updated" list on the "Extensions" page is missing the corner background.

Dao's comments

• I don't see how the user is expected to find, say, Thunderbird extensions. AMO2 was too Firefox-centric, AMO3 seems even worse. http://www.erweiterungen.de/ does this better.
• Old URLs don't work, e.g. http://preview.addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398/ vs. http://preview.addons.mozilla.org/addons/display/398. I don't see the purpose of /addons (it's already in the subdomain) and /display.
  • The URL redirects are already filed as a bug (362526) --wenzel

DonGato's comments

• There is no information about the last update of an extension (at least in the home page and most probably in the newest page as with current AMO, but I can't say as this page is not available in the preview). This is an important information while browsing extensions.
• 'Welcome to Mozilla add-ons' should stand up more in design but not space. Currently is taking a lot of space and not being necessarily clear.
• Doesn't discussion header looks bad? I think a right and left border is needed.

trev's comments

• Default Locale field on /developers/add seems to encode entities twice, e.g. I see Français there
• If you don't select the addon type, you will get a second message: "That file extension (.xpi) is not allowed for the selected add-on type." That pretty pointless.
• Having to re-upload files on errors is not nice at all. Files should be kept and the input field should be replaced by the file name to indicate that they are already there.
• Isn't it possible to detect add-on type automatically? The file will need to be unpacked and analyzed anyway.
• When I fill out all fields correctly I get the error "Could not move file". Stuck at step 1.

pascalc's comments

• on the right sidebar menu, the "Build your own" link should point to the localized version of the documentation (http://developer.mozilla.org/{locale}/docs/Extensions) if it exists
  • I agree. But I wonder how we can find out if it exists, before making the link. --wenzel 10:24, 16 January 2007 (PST)
• Website ignores Thunderbird, the front page should at least say "Add-ons extend Firefox and Thunderbird..." and not only Firefox

LCaution's comments (from blog)

• I’d like to have an option to display items with a one-line description. Display a simple, hyperlinked list, in alphabetical order, with the name of the extension/theme/whatever and a one-sentence description of what it does. Click on the one-liner and a new tab opens to a page with a full description, comments, download, etc.

Omnisilver's comments (from blog)

• Create a page with microformats (or use microformats in the app, at least)

RenegadeX's comments

It's hard to test the Preview site properly with the limited # of addons currently added, but I 2nd everything already said on this page. Have you guys learnt nothing over 3+ revisions of AMO? Users are tearing out their hair crying, "All I want to do is find a specific addon or browse the mass of addons quickly and easily" - and yet with each AMO revision, it continues to be a frustrating experience:

• The site isn't written in Hebrew or Arabic, and yet the site layout is 'reversed'. I can't imagine the reason for suddenly breaking convention and moving the Menu over to the right. (hint: Menus are normally presented on the left in the Western world because we tend to look there first before moving our eyes to the right..)
• Why is the Search box STILL at the bottom of the pages and not on every page - instead of being in a standard location at the top - so that no scrolling or clicking is required in order to access it? Enough people voiced their opinion when it was introduced in v2 - and I've yet to see anyone agree with AMO and say it's better on the bottom. This is absolutely ridiculous.
• What's with the layout of the Category pages (which you arrive at via 'Browse By Category').. 1 seemingly-random addon is prominent(full-width) at the top, with ONLY 2 ITEMS shown below it, sharing the horizontal space (rather than being all the same size, one below the other). What's the little blue-&-yellow icon by the lower 2 and why does the first item not have one? Why bother with an 'Other Add-ons' box at the bottom containing the names of other addons from the same category - after all, aren't I 'Browsing'?? There is no consistency here, nor logic, it seems.
• As 'Gijs' mentioned, the Category listing pages (such as 'Extensions') now display the categories in a seemingly-random jumble, rather than alphabetically, which is how it used to be. (Could you guys be any more obtuse?) To clarify, the old way was sorted alphabetically but read left-to-right across rows - better yet would be 3 alphabetically-sorted top-down columns with column separators between them.
• It seems (on the Recommended Addons page, anyhow) that the default # of results per page view is 5 - which is far too low. (It used to be 10, what was wrong with that?). And why even waste time with an option of 2 results per page?
• What happened to 'more previews' link/text that used to be below an extension/theme's preview image? Gone or not yet implemented? Please implement and re-link the image (v2 removed this feature for some reason).
• Broken: The menu's Find Similar Add-ons' items are currently linked incorrectly - they point to the Category, but not to the 'type', so nothing is found. ex: the Extensions category 'Search Tools' is currently http://preview.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/addons/browse/13 - but it should be "../browse/1/13"
• Broken: Similar to above, the "Subscribe to this Category" RSS Link points to a feed URL such as http://preview.addons.mozilla.org/addons/rss/categories/13 - when it follows that it should be "/1/13". Interestingly, '13' and '1/13' both have stuff in them, category 1035 and category 1017 respectively. That's somewhat confusing, especially as the RSS feed does not have an identifiable-by-name name..
• On an Extension(or Theme)'s page, you have the Extension Name followed by Version# on the same line (good to see it back, thanks - v2 was not good). Further down the page you have Version# and timestamp, which is thus partially redundant & a waste of space. Suggestion: Add the word "version" besides the version# of the Name line, and move the timestamp up beside the Author.
• Ditto the above, on the other listing pages (such as Recommended Add-ons). (And echoing 'Gijs' - what's that little icon before "Version" for?)
• Where is "Previous Versions" link?
• Where is the Rating for extensions and themes? These were important to the user in helping decide what extensions were worthwhile installing! Sure the numbers got skewed - but that was because of a poorly-thought-out Feedback/Comment system that forced users to leave a rating with a comment, and didn't allow users to edit their rating (see IMDB, perhaps?). You should have fixed the problems, rather than take the whole thing away. Is this progress? No.
• Why no Dictionaries link in the Menu? v2 never included it (to coincide with Firefox 2.0's introduction of the built-in spell-checker). Do that, and include a link to the Dictionaries extension Category on it, and vice-versa.
• Still no 'Browse All/Browse by letter' feature. This is sorely needed.

I could easily go on with my list but this is getting depressing. This thing was meant to be an improvement, was it not? Come on, this shouldn't be this difficult! RenegadeX 04:26, 17 January 2007 (PST)