Adding-on to yesterday’s post

Yesterday, we announced that we were renaming Firefox Add-ons to Firefox Change-arounds. After the outpouring of feedback to our announcement post, we’ve decided to reverse the name change and go back to “add-ons”. An additional factor in making this decision was that it’s no longer April Fool’s Day.

As a few commenters noted, we would never really make a decision this big without having a discussion in the community first, as add-ons touch so many parts of the Mozilla platform.

So, why’d we do an April Fool’s joke on AMO this year?

• We wanted to have some fun and give the site some personality. A change like this can add some excitement to an otherwise routine task for people that visit AMO often.
• We hoped people would share the site with their friends, pointing out the April Fool’s joke and increasing exposure to Firefox add-ons.
• We wanted to draw attention to this blog, so that people would know it exists and is a great resource for finding out about our non-made-up plans for AMO.

We wanted to do something that wasn’t too over-the-top — something that many people wouldn’t even notice, but would be a little humorous to those that did. And we wanted something simple to implement so we wouldn’t waste time that could be used for all of our planned improvements over the next few months (find-and-replace made this change very easy!). I’m planning on publishing an analysis in a few weeks about the effects of this change, if any, that were seen in traffic, add-on downloads, and other metrics.