There was some buzz today about the planned features for Firefox 3 and the first item on the list involved the Add-ons, something I’ve often talked about as an example of Mozilla creating their own Rich Internet Application platform. In these requirements the goal seems to be to make them more user friendly:
Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.
Obviously if users can’t figure out how to install your extension, it’s going to be tough to grow a platform around that.
In the end, it’s going to be interesting to see how XUL can advance in this next version of Firefox. I caught a comment in a good post over at Lab49 that mentioned XUL and how it was difficult to get started and documentation was poor. As the Guiding Principles of Firefox note:
Be, if possible, a vehicle for emerging Mozilla platform APIs including XULRunner, which will allow application developers a means to deploy useful software to people that is not necessarily tied to a particular operating system.
We’ll see if they can make that happen.
[tags]Firefox, Mozilla, XUL, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
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