As part of Mozilla's regular updates for the add-ons site

Nov 4, 2011 21:11 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has released a couple of updates for the Mozilla Add-ons site, which houses all of the useful extensions and themes for Firefox, Thunderbird and so on. There is now an improved stats dashboard with a new design and better performance.

Mozilla has also started using Ajax to serve search results, leading to much better performance for users, who don't need to wait for a new page to load to see the results.

The new Stats Dashboard aims to present more data from the get go, making it easier to get a comprehensive view with one glance. The first page now houses the three most used charts, Top Applications, Top Languages and Top Platforms.

The dashboard itself sports a new look that better integrates with the new AMO and is generally an improvement.

Finally, the big improvement is that all of this is done via Python rather than PHP as before, ensuring a much snappier response. Mozilla plans to do the same for even more AMO components to cut short load times.

"We’ve made it faster and easier to page through search results using Ajax. Rather than load new pages as you browse through results, new results are shown in-line," Mozilla's Amy Tsay wrote.

The new search results page, which you may already have spotted in the wild, automatically detects your Firefox version to display only add-ons that are compatible with it. Of course, you may change that and search for add-ons compatible with any and all Firefox versions.

Since the new results page is built with Ajax, search results are loaded instantaneously when selecting different filters. Finally, you can now use shortcut keys to switch between pages, just push left or right.

Mozilla is constantly working on improving the Add-ons website, one of the most visited in the world. In recent months its gotten a brand new look, but also some improvements under the hood.

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The new AMO stats dashboard
The new AMO Ajax search results page
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