Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers

New tagging feature for add-ons on AMO

5 responses

There are multiple ways to find great add-ons on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). You can browse the content featured on the homepage, use the top navigation to drill down into add-on types and categories, or search for specific add-ons or functionality. Now, we’re adding another layer of classification and opportunities for discovery by bringing back a feature called tags.

We introduced tagging long ago, but ended up discontinuing it because the way we implemented it wasn’t as useful as we thought. Part of the problem was that it was too open-ended, and anyone could tag any add-on however they wanted. This led to spamming, over-tagging, and general inconsistencies that made it hard for users to get helpful results.

Now we’re bringing tags back, but in a different form. Instead of free-form tags, we’ll provide a set of predefined tags that developers can pick from. We’re starting with a small set of tags based on what we’ve noticed users looking for, so it’s possible many add-ons don’t match any of them. We will expand the list of tags if this feature performs well.

The tags will be displayed on the listing page of the add-on. We also plan to display tagged add-ons in the AMO homepage.

Example of a tag shelf in the AMO homepage

Example of a tag shelf in the AMO homepage

We’re only just starting to roll this feature out, so we might be making some changes to it as we learn more about how it’s used. For now, add-on developers should visit the Developer Hub and set any relevant tags for their add-ons. Any tags that had been set prior to July 22, 2021 were removed when the feature was retooled.

5 comments on “New tagging feature for add-ons on AMO”

  1. Stig wrote on

    Well, that was really a strange limited set of tags. Especially because many of them seemed very specific. What’s the difference from just introducing some more categories?
    None of the tags was fitting any of my extensions.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      We’re overdue updating our categories, yes. However, categories and tags are meant to serve different purposes. Categories are meant to be broad and comprehensive, while tags are supposed to be more specific and cover topics that categories can’t. Most sites that use both features will show full lists of categories that allow users to browse the content that way, while tags generally won’t be fully listed and only show up in individual items or in search, as a way to look for related content.

  2. Yves wrote on

    It could be nice if there was a category or filter-tag “open-source” if the source of the add-on is published, for example on github or other

  3. Josh wrote on

    Can there be a separate list of tags for themes? I really love making them but without tags they can be harder to find. The tags given have almost nothing to do with themes. Is this just something that was overlooked? I’d love to see some improvement here, the themes are my favorite!

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      The current tag set is mostly meant for extensions, yes.