I made some changes to the MDN WebExtension page. What do you think?

Add-ons addons.mozilla.org
#1

Hi,

A lot of people ask a lot of trivial questions both here and on reddit related to WebExtensions. Some don’t know the difference between listed and unlisted addons, don’t know how to sign them, how to debug them and so on. I started collecting a lot of mostly MDN bookmarks and I usually reply with one of them on each question.

Now I figured: why not add all these bookmarks into one MDN page? So I started adding them into the WebExtensions page. You might need to Ctrl+F5 in order to ignore the cache when loading the page.

What do you think? I know some links were there already but I think telling a story is better. Keep in mid that there are a lot of Chrome extension devs trying to port their extensions to Firefox and they are completely clueless about this. Some of them never used Firefox ever.

What do you think? Is it too much? Is there any information missing? Is there something wrong?

Thank you,
Andrei

1 Like
#2

Hmmm. My edits have been reverted by wbamberg. Any idea how to contact him? I would like to have a page the text I added. Maybe that page was not the best place for it or maybe MDN is not the best place either. Worst case scenario I will create a github repo with markdown readme or some gist with the text.

Basically this was the text I added

#3

You can ask @wbamberg here.

Personally, I find that introduction too long and specific. I think the main page should have a brief description and then just list all the relevant information, so people can find what they’re looking for. Also, it includes lots of information that is copied in other articles, so updating it becomes a larger task because there’s yet another place that needs to be updated.

#4

Sorry to revert your edits without discussing them first. I only saw this post after I’d already seen the edits. I already talked to you about this in a PM, but: I do appreciate your efforts to improve the docs. I reverted the changes mostly for a couple of reasons:

  • I want that page to function mainly as an index of links into the docs. I think starting it off with a wall of text makes it function less well as an index.

  • I want the WebExtensions docs to be browser-agnostic as far as possible: I want Edge developers to be relatively comfortable visiting these pages, and I don’t want them to have to disentangle what’s Firefox-specific from what works in Edge. A lot of the content you added was Firefox-specific, and I think would be quite alienating for people targeting other browsers.

About the problem you identify:

A lot of people ask a lot of trivial questions both here and on reddit related to WebExtensions.

To be honest, I think some people read the docs to find the answers, and some go straight to asking trivial questions, and there’s not much we can do to change this. For example: “Some don’t know…how to debug them” - well, there’s a link in that main page called “Debugging”, that tells you how to do this. If you load the main page, type ctrl+F, type “debug”: you’ll find it. If someone can’t do that I’d really question whether they would read your text, find the about:debugging link, follow that link, then read that page to find the link to the same “Debugging” page that’s already linked from the main page.

#5

Consistency of wording: WebExtensions APIs

From points of reference such as The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Add-ons Blog (2015-08-21) and https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions I assume that a commonly used phrase should be:

  • WebExtensions APIs

– plural for both words.

(Not WebExtension API; not WebExtensions API (unless referring to a just one of the WebExtensions APIs; not WebExtension APIs; …)

True?