Community Involvement in Recommended Extensions

Firefox Logo on blue backgroundIn July we launched the Recommended Extensions program, which entailed a complete reboot of our editorial process on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Previously we placed a priority on regularly featuring new extensions to explore. With the Recommended program, we’ve shifted our focus to editorially vetting and monitoring a fairly fixed collection of high-quality extensions.

For years community contributors on the Featured Extensions Board played a big role in selecting AMO’s monthly curated content. We intend to maintain a community project aligned with the new Recommended program. We’re in the process now of reshaping the project to be known as the Recommended Extensions Community Board. As before, the board will be comprised of contributors who possess a keen passion for, and expertise of, browser extensions. Board membership will rotate every six months.

The add-ons team is currently assembling the first Recommended Extensions Community Board. To help shape the foundation of this project, we’re aiming to fill the debut board with some of our most prolific past editorial contributors. In general, the Recommended Extensions Community Board will focus on:

  • Ongoing evaluation of current Recommended extensions. All Recommended extensions are under active development. As such, contributors will participate in ongoing re-evaluations to ensure the curated list maintains a high overall quality standard.
  • Evaluating new submissions. As mentioned above, we do not anticipate significant amounts of churn on the Recommended list. That said, Firefox users want the latest and greatest extensions available, so the board will also play a role in evaluating new candidate submissions.
  • Special projects. Each board will also focus on a special project or two. For instance, we may closely examine a specific type of content within the Recommended list (e.g. let’s look at all of the Recommended bookmark managers; is this the strongest collection of bookmark managers we can compile?)

Future boards (rotating every six months) will have an open enrollment process. When the time arrives to form the next board, we’ll post information on the application process here on this blog and our other communication channels.

If you are interested in exploring the current curated list, here are all Recommended extensions.

4 comments on “Community Involvement in Recommended Extensions”

  1. Alexei wrote on

    Why is “AdBlocker Ultimate”, a dubious clone of AdGuard (https://www.ghacks.net/2019/07/25/mozilla-recommends-a-firefox-extensions-that-appears-to-be-a-copycat/), still recommended months after being brought to your attention?

    1. Juraj Mäsiar wrote on

      To teach you a lesson developing opensource software 😀 I guess.

      It’s true that sometimes a clone becomes a much better alternative, but is this the case…?
      And surely this reflects poorly on Firefox.

      Maybe it’s worth to ask this on Discourse, usually they respond with some meaningful explanation:
      https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/add-ons/addons-mozilla-org

  2. Andrey wrote on

    Sorry, but you are going in the wrong direction.

    Right now you are trying to create an ‘elite’ group of ‘recommended’ extensions, but there are two issues:
    1. Either you will be not able to control a quality of ‘elite’ extensions or number of these extensions will be small, killing the best FF benefit.
    2. You are discouraging extension developers – I am not enjoying to see stupid yellow tag with stupid comment on my free, clean extensions. I’ll maintain them for some time, but will research other platforms or drop them completely if there is no good alternative.

    Right direction is develop a scanner for potentially malicious extensions and _manually_ review flagged ones. Means try to filter out bad ones rather then kill all in favorite of ‘elite’ ones.
    Btw, your ‘elite’ choice is completely off – I have 0 ‘recommended’ extensions installed.

  3. Andrey wrote on

    Looks like Mozilla is listen to comments – offensive yellow tag was removed.
    Thank you.