I don't think Mozilla really hate us, they just don't understand what they are doing.
I've been developing extensions for several years now, and if there is one thing that is constant, it is how much of a pain Mozilla and addons.mozilla.org (AMO) can be. This is an expanded version of a comment I left on Mark Finkle's blog.
The Good
After years of not sharing any information about how many installs/users your extension has, the new site gives you that information and some of it is public (showing 4,316 downloads on both the extension listings and details pages).
The Bad
That leads us to the pain section. Users who visit the site have NO idea what download number means.
The only logical thing to assume is there have been a total of 4,316 downloads of the extensions. But what it actually means is downloads in the last week (as you can see from the information they show on the developers view of the site.)
Mozilla, if you thought that downloads this week told the complete story to potential users, why are you always celebrating total downloads?
The previous version of the site had both comments (reviews) and a simple threaded forum attached to each extension. The UI wasn't clear and lead to confusion as people would use both interchangeably. The two have been combined into a single feature in the new site, threaded reviews, which leads us to the ugly.
The Ugly
I build extensions that I want to use. I publish them to AMO because I hope others will want to use them as well. I want to interact with my users. I want to hear their feedback, both problems and kudos. When moving to the new version of the site AMO deleted all the old forum conversations. I took the time to visit AMO regularly to respond to my users. To talk with them to determine how to fix compatibility issues with Tab Max Plus.
When I said I visited the site regularly, I do mean manually visited my addon's page. AMO didn't and still does not provide feeds or emails to developers of user feedback. Responding to users who have problems requires constant checks.
To make matters worse, Mozilla has an inefficient editorial review process that removes any possibility of interacting with your users. Reviews can not show up for multiple weeks. Hanging out in #addons I got to see a conversation where an extension developer was asking why his responses to reviews on his extensions weren't showing up. The addon's editor responds that it wasn't personal, that they hadn't checked the queue in a while and when the editor checked there were thousands of comments awaiting review.
Communication with your users is impossible. A two sentence conversation would take a month at this rate.
Mozilla's inefficient editorial review doesn't limit itself to just reviews, they also review extensions before they are made public. Releasing a new version can take over a week, during which time users are frustrated as the extension is disabled in the newest beta.
Mozilla's release process for new versions of the beta leaves both developers and users in the dark. Mozilla seems to not know the meaning of a code freeze, as they continue making large changes to the beta after they say the code has frozen. Only after the beta is released the extension developer may upload a new version of extension to fix any issues and mark that it is compatible with the new version (no lead time before Mozilla's software updates for Firefox start occurring.) Then you must wait up to a week for them to review the new version and post it for users. During this period there is no visibility. Users aren't shown that a new version is being reviewed (although unreviewed extensions are shown when you search the site!), so the users who love your work the most end up writing angry emails asking when you will fix your extension. Developers don't know their place in the queue.
All of this makes me have a bad taste in my mouth when Mozilla tells us Update or Fade Away.
The Future
What can Mozilla do to improve? Think about the situation from an extension developer's point of view. Talk to us. Many of the things I pointed out can be treated as "bugs", but creating a checklist to be fixed as such is treating the symptoms. Think about ways to make it a better experience to develop for Mozilla, instead of being a pain in the ass.
AMO and all of the processes around extensions give firefox at large, firefox extension developers and AMO itself a bad reputation due to all the functional and process breakage.
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