Mozilla has just launched their new Firefox Add-ons site that shows off a sparkling and freshly revamped interface. Back in February we took a glimpse at what a preview of the new add-ons site had to offer, and overall I would say that it is a really nice improvement over the prior version.









The thing that I like the most is that the add-ons in the Sandbox are actually shown with the search results regardless of whether you are logged in. They are labeled as “experimental” add-ons if they are in the Sandbox, and if you want to install them you’ll still need to login. At least users will know that the add-ons exist which was a big complaint of the extension developers that I had talked to before. It was almost discouraging for developers to create extensions since they weren’t widely available to the public right away.

There are two things that I don’t like though. The first is that there is still no way to customize the sort order of your search results. I’m sure this has to do with performance issues, but I hate not being able to see my search results according to popularity or most recently released.

The second thing that I don’t like, and this is quite a doozy for me, is that the site now checks what version of Firefox you’re running. And guess what, it won’t let you install an extension that doesn’t meet the version requirements specified by the developer. If an extension is compatible with your Firefox you’ll see the typical button on the pictured on the left side below, otherwise it will be replaced with the button on the right:

I looked around and I saw no place where I could change this setting, and seeing that I’m the type of person who likes to test out pre-release versions of Firefox this can cause a lot of headaches. I’m currently running Firefox 3 Beta 4, and many of the extensions are disabled for me since the developers haven’t gotten around to updating them. Sure this is nice so that people don’t think an extension will work with their version of Firefox, but what about people who want to try them anyway?

Check it out and let us know what you think about the new site.

Firefox Add-ons Homepage

Thanks to Yansky for the tip!