[Blog post] Recommended Extensions program — coming soon

Add-ons Announcements
#1

Earlier this year, VP of Firefox Product Nick Nguyen blogged about the challenge of helping extension users maintain their safety and security while preserving their ability to choose their browsing experience. The blog post outlined changes to the ecosystem to better protect users, such as making them more aware of the risks associated with extensions, reducing the visibility of extensions that haven’t been vetted, and putting more emphasis on curated extensions.

One of the ways we’re helping users discover vetted extensions will be through the Recommended Extensions program, which we’ll roll out in phases later this summer.

More details about this program can be found on the Add-ons Blog.

Please feel to post any comments or questions to this thread.

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#2

The question has already been asked, but I am still not sure what is the difference to the featured extensions, which already exists today.
Also, will the featured extensions continue to be provided or will they be replaced by recommend extensions?

And if both exist, how do you think will users notice the difference? I doubt they can actually know/determinate the difference between “featured” and “recommend” extensions. Or actually rank the terms to notice what is better now: featured or recommend?
Also can extensions be both: featured and recommend?

#3

Hi there. I’ll try to add more detail to what I already mentioned in the blog comments you referenced (indeed, though, I’d reiterate it’s the manual code review for each new version of a Recommended extension that is one of the biggest distinctions between Recommended and Featured; also, yes, Recommended extensions will eventually replace Featured on AMO).

Another way Recommended will be different from Featured is developer participation in the program. Featured extension developers have never been asked to change any portion of their software design to become Featured, whereas with the Recommended program, we are likely to invite most developers into the program with a list of conditional fixes and improvements.

Because of the depth of developer partnership in this program—and because we want users who install Recommended extensions to feel confident trusting the software over its lifespan—we don’t anticipate a lot of content turnover on the Recommended list, once it’s has been built to the threshold of our capacity to actively curate and manage it.

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