The new and improved addons.mozilla.org is a huge step forward, and although Basil, Madhava and Morgamic have already written excellent posts about it, I thought I’d chime in with a few quick thoughts.

As something the other browsers either couldn’t or wouldn’t duplicate, the volume and diversity of add-ons has always been one of Firefox’s competitive advantages and have been detailed accordingly as a key part in our overall communications strategy. However, the old AMO site wasn’t the easiest thing to navigate, especially for new users who needed a more gentle introduction to that world. The redesigned site (along with the new add-ons manager in Firefox 3) is much more accessible and makes our job of spreading the word about how to customize your browser much easier.

From a design perspective, a couple of key issues we had to solve were 1) how to make individual add-ons as discoverable as possible and 2) how closely should the site’s navigation be integrated with Mozilla.com (the old AMO site shared a top nav bar with Mozilla.com, but some of the links were different…a major UI headache). As you can see from this early mockup, the original answers were 1) tabs with a secondary search bar and 2) keep the close ties to Mozilla.com.

However, after more thought we introduced the more prominent search field and replaced the full header navigation with a small Mozilla.com tab off to the side. There’s also a much clearer list of the categories down the left side of the page and a menu to access Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird add-ons at the top:

This redesigned site is the product of the hard work of dozens of people across the Mozilla community. On the visual side, special thanks go to Madhava Enros for his amazingly detailed wireframes and Henry Brown for his graphic design work.