14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox had a lot of things going for it when it first burst onto the scene, a great community behind it, a solid marketing effort and, perhaps even more important, it was a great product. But if there’s one thing that helped Firefox gain such a big share of the market in the past few years, then that is its add-ons. The ability to customize your browser and bolt on any functionality the developers can think of proved to be irresistible and is still one of Firefox’s main selling points today.
The landscape has changed though, especially with the arrival of Google Chrome, and the browser market is a lot more competitive today. In fact, it could be argued that the Firefox add-ons platform is falling behind Chrome’s. There are a lot more Firefox add-ons, but they’re also harder to install and maintain.
The Jetpack project is working on fixing some of the shortcomings, but there’s another part of the equation, which may have just gotten a solution. The brand-new add-on manager introduced in the Firefox.next (Firefox 3.7) nightly builds should make add-on management a much faster and easier experience.
Taking another page out of Google Chrome’s playbook, the fresh add-on manager opens up in a new tab, inside the browser, rather than in its own dedicated window. It enables you to manage add-ons, themes and plugins from the same page and looks a lot better than the existing one. Actually, it will enable you to do all that, as not all the components are working yet.
The icons and theme aren’t final yet, Mozilla warns, but they already look pretty sleek. Still, this is just the first iteration, released for testing purposes. More functionality will be added and the changes will be more than skin deep. Jetpacks will be supported at some point, and the entire extension manager backend will get an overhaul.
