By Michael Cohn

Mozilla relaunched its add-ons site Monday for its open source Firefox web browser, drastically cutting down the number of add-on programs from 2,500 to 200 in an effort to present the most polished browser plug-ins to the general public.

add-ons site

The organization is offering increased localization for the add-ons it will present on the site to the international user base, along with translations of reviews that people provide of the various add-ons to make it easier for general users to be able to find the most useful ones.

The old add-ons won’t go away, though. Mozilla will still make them available for testing, and the organization will allow more users to participate in the testing and evaluating process for the various Firefox add-ons before they become available to the general public.

Mozilla has established a relatively small but fiercely dedicated share of the browser market as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The organization has relied on a worldwide community of programmers to help it develop the open source browser, which was originally based on code donated by AOL’s Netscape unit.

Many of the volunteer developers come up with new features by creating add-ons that may eventually become part of the overall Firefox code base if they catch on with users.

But the rush to develop browser plug-ins and put them on the site has produced a glut of software that has not been sufficiently tested, making it harder for many users to decide which add-ons are worthwhile to try out, especially if the notes about the programs are in a language they don’t speak.

The new Firefox Add-ons site aims to make it simpler for users to find the best of the bunch.

“It will show off polished add-ons that don’t require specialized knowledge,” said Mike Shaver, director of ecosystem development at Mozilla. “You will see a pruning of that and focusing of that. Users can opt to test the extensions and add-ons, to guide developers and us when to push them out to the full view of Firefox’s nearly 100 million users.”

Kodak Deal

On another front in the add-on market, Mozilla has also been making allies with large companies such as Eastman Kodak, creating an add-on Friday for Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery known as Firefox Companion for Kodak Gallery that streamlines the process of uploading and sharing photos.

Some of the most popular add-ons, according to Mr. Shaver, are related to social networking and the sharing of web experiences, including snippets of web pages or comments on web pages, including an extension to Yahoo’s del.icio.us service, Jeteye for collecting links, and the BlueOrganizer from AdaptiveBlue.

“They’re representative of the Mozilla core values,” said Mr. Shaver. “The user should be in control of their web experience.”

Another significant class of add-ons integrates different web services such as alerts of sports scores and stock quotes, as well as comparison-shopping services like Pronto Shopping Messenger.

Mozilla has even been working with its archrival Microsoft to make Firefox compatible with the new Windows Vista operating system. A group of Firefox engineers visited Redmond last summer to work with the Vista compatibility team to make sure Firefox would run well on Vista.

Vista

Mr. Shaver said Mozilla was continuing to roll out improvements to Firefox to improve integration with Vista and take better advantage of other Vista features.

Vista

Right now the main integration work revolves around managing external applications and new security features for saving files. In the future, Mozilla plans to integrate Vista’s parental controls feature further.

Vista

Mr. Shaver pointed out that even if users aren’t running Firefox, they’re still benefiting from the work the organization has done. Some of the features that Microsoft added to Internet Explorer 7, such as tabbed browsing, were influenced by Firefox and other browsers like Opera and Apple’s Safari.

Better Sense of History

Meanwhile, with the new add-ons site, Mozilla aims to provide a more complete update history for the add-ons and to open up the testing and review process, as well as make sure that any fixes get integrated into the add-on that’s made available to users.

“Any complex software will have bugs in it, especially software on the Internet that will affect security,” said Mr. Shaver.

Mozilla’s integrated update system will make it easier for the organization to get the latest version and fixes out to users. There will also be a block list tool that will be able to instruct Firefox to block any dangerous add-on that the organization believes needs to be acted upon immediately.

“We haven’t had to use that yet,” said Mr. Shaver. “We need to be very cautious about that.”

He doesn’t see the revamped add-on site as a way for Mozilla to assert more control over its developers, though.

“Our intent is not so much to have a sort of control of the kinds of features that are exposed,” said Mr. Shaver. “It’s so a less technically savvy user gets what they expect from a given add-on, and knows what effect it will have on their browser. The user needs to be aware of those kinds of things. By broadening the testing community, it will accelerate the testing and approval process.”

He said that ardent Firefox fans will still be able to test the latest add-ons.

“That experimental and innovative aspect is one of the huge values of add-ons for Firefox,” he said. “You’re able to see innovation in the browser in a deep way. The choice of add-ons will influence in a very real way the future of the browser. We’re trying to make that a more inclusive process for what we do with Firefox and what we hope to make of the web.”