14 DAY TRIAL // Browser add-ons are great. It all started with Firefox offering the functionality and it's still probably the browser with the most add-ons. That said, while many are great, most add-ons feel bolted on and adding several of them can quickly turn Firefox into a mess.
Part of the problem is that Firefox has allowed add-ons to do pretty much whatever they wanted to the UI and few developers have tried to integrate their tools with the overall Firefox look and feel.
But that's about to change, if an announcement by Mozilla is to be believed. There are no concrete plans yet, but Mozilla wants add-ons to feel integral to Firefox and will do something about it. We just don't know what, yet.
"Right now, add-ons feel like they were literally added on top of Firefox’s User Experience," Mozilla intern Sinchan Banerjee writes.
"The user experience shouldn’t make add-ons feel like they are awkwardly layered over our Firefox’s default UI — they should be fundamentally integrated into the UI so that Firefox fits your specific needs," he said.
The truth is, he's right. Even the most popular and well thought out add-ons feel out of place. And adding more than a few of them becomes a nightmare if you care about how the Firefox UI looks and works.
"That’s why Firefox’s User Experience team is designing a new experience that reflects the fact that add-ons make up an integral part of Firefox Functionality," Mozilla said.
"Out-of-box functionality and functionality that comes from add-ons shouldn’t be treated differently because at the end of the day, to the user, there should be just Firefox functionality," it added.
What exactly does this mean? Only Mozilla knows so far, but it promises to fills us in soon. Whatever it is, it will probably make things better, as, even with the latest changes in Firefox 4, the Firefox add-on user experience is still a mess.