Soft Launch of Extension Workshop

Add-ons Announcements
#1

Hello, everyone!

The add-ons team would like to invite you to test Extension Workshop, a new hub to connect developers to the resources they need to successfully develop, publish, and manage their Firefox extensions. A lot of this documentation previously lived on MDN; by moving it to Extension Workshop, MDN can better serve its mission to provide information about platform-agnostic web technologies.

We would love to hear about your experience with Extension Workshop. Please let us know on this thread how easily you are able to find information, if the site behaves as you would expect it to, and if you come across any bugs.

After we’ve heard and addressed early feedback, the site will be promoted through the Developer Hub on addons.mozilla.org and our usual communication channels later this month.

Thank you!

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#2

May be I’m missing something but I’ve spent quite some time and didn’t managed to find API reference on the new website. On the contrary, when I open “Browser Extensions” page on MDN, I immediately see links to detailed reference of manifest.json and JS API modules which are single click away.
May be this part of the documentation still supposed to live on MDN? In that case I don’t think that spreading documentation on the single topic across several websites on the internet is useful and convenient.
MDN has convenient browser compatibility tables which I also don’t see on the new website (well, no API reference, no tables).

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#3

Thanks for your feedback, @m_khvoinitsky. Because the APIs were intended to be cross-browser compatible, our thought was to keep the reference documentation on MDN to serve a “browser agnostic” audience. Things that are specific to Firefox – including AMO-specific information like our Add-on Policies – was moved to Extension Workshop. Our goal is to link the information together as best as possible.

#4

Hi Caitlin,

I just took a short look so far. While I do like the idea of a website like this, it feels a bit confusing to me. The landing page has information scattered around the place. Some links can be found in the top menu, others are somewhere in the text below. Some link to MDN, others to the same site.

I think as a newcomer, I would be a bit overwhelmed by all of this.

I will have to take some time to read more to give better feedback. This is just the first impression I had.

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#5

Sorry, it took some time, but I finally got to take a deeper look:

  • manifest.json is listed on the overview-page, but it has no explanation popup
  • Some things like making extensions secure feel more like a second step to learning extension development.
    Maybe it would be good to show different paths for different skill levels… i.e. Ask the question “what’s your web-extension knowledge” and presenting buttons to more detailed pages “beginner” “chrome developer wanting to port to firefox”, “advanced, trying to improve security, etc.”
  • the page “Extension Basics” kind of repeats some of the links from the landing page.
    • it also talks about manifest.json, which has not yet been covered.
  • I wonder if you could list the webextension-polyfill-ts for typescript developers in addition to the webextension-polyfill.
  • About upboarding: I’ve noticed users like the option to turn off such release note informations. In forget me not I only use a notification, not a new tab, but even this seems to be annoying enough to require a checkbox to never show it again. Maybe it should be recommended that this can be turned off by users.
  • I think all the references to legacy add-ons should go into a separate area, which focuses on porting legacy code. When you are starting a new extension you don’t want to read about the things you’re never going to get in touch with.
  • This is also very confusing when reading about applications and browser_specific_settings. Maybe I missed the part where it said, that applications is deprecated (was new to me btw).
  • Sometimes I only found some pages via the “up next” section. Not sure if I missed those links in the main pages or if it was hidden because I was browsing the page with a mobile device.

Mobile specific:

  • On the publish page, there is a video, which is getting cut off when viewed in landscape mode. It makes it impossible to use the navigation bar below the video.
  • The fixed dropdown menu takes a lot of space, especially in landscape mode. Not sure why this need to stay visible all the time.
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#6

Overall, I even found some good new information as a more experienced developer. The content itself is quite good… It just needs to be restructured a bit I think.

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#7

From what I’ve seen so far most of the content was migrated from pages that have existed on MDN, if a bit obscure to find.

Lastly, this page is based on gitbook, so you can make PRs to it, just like you could edit a MDN page!

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