Japan/AMJ

Introduction

We at Mozilla Japan have our own Firefox add-ons library (AMJ) instead of Firefox Add-ons (AMO). Here is some background information on the AMJ service.

Although AMO's interface is fully localizable, we have some problems:

AMO has no capability to search/browse add-ons by locale. (Bug 285850)
AMO has no capability to find authors by locale.
Some add-ons are localized with machine translation. Those qualities are bad for Japanese.
Some add-ons are partially localized. It's impossible to pick up really localized add-ons mechanically.
~~AMO's search engine doesn't support multibyte queries.~~ - partially fixed?
Most of localized add-ons don't have their localized summary and description on AMO.
- Therefore, we cannot search these add-ons by Japanese even if they're localized.
- Example: search タブ (tab) on AMO (only 13 results) vs AMJ (110 results)
Most of the recommended add-ons are not localized.
- The requirements should have l10n for the Tier 1 and 2 locales.

The bottom line is, it's very difficult for us to find add-ons which can be used in our language.

To resolve these issues, we've started the AMJ project as an AMO proxy.

AMJ allows Japanese Firefox users to search/browse extensions which are developed by Japanese companies/individuals or (almost) completely localized.
- As of February 2011, there are 650+ extensions listed.
- The list has been maintained manually since October 2006.
- Since January 2011, we have been adding the Preliminarily Reviewed add-ons.
AMJ combines AMO's data with our own data:
- The add-on meta data is imported through AMO's public API (description, screenshot, icon, etc.)
- AMJ showcases extensions with completely localized summaries and numbers of weekly downloads. Those numbers are counted on the AMJ server and indicate which extensions are popular for Japanese users.
- AMJ also shows numbers of tweets/bookmarks which are retrieved from Twitter and some social bookmark services.
AMJ has own 20 categories. (Unfortunately AMO's categories are useless... Those are arbitrarily assigned by the add-on authors, not by the editors. Also, types of categories are not enough for every add-on.)
AMJ has own featured extension list.
AMJ is fully integrated into Japanese Firefox builds (ja and ja-JP-mac locales), and the users can search/browse through the Add-ons Manager interface. (Bug 427323)
- Currently the integration has been broken due to the changes on AMO. See Bug 505077 for details.

We are working on upgrading the AMJ service.