Mozilla News: New CEO, AMO Changes, Army of Awesome
Here are three things that have been keeping my favorite browser developer occupied recently. First up, Mozilla has a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). It took about 6 months of searching, but finally a successor for John Lilly has finally been found – his name is Gary Kovacs and he will be officially starting work on the 8th of November. Before joining the Mozilla team he was a General Manager and VP of Mobile and Devices with Adobe, and before that he spent 10 years working with IBM.
Here’s the second thing that has been keeping Mozilla busy – changes to addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
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The following AMO features have been discontinued:
- The pilot program that allowed developers to create listings on AMO for their add-ons, without requiring the add-ons to be hosted or reviewed by the AMO team, has been terminated.
As the Mozilla Add-ons team explained, the program just didn’t prove to be very popular; consequently support for self-hosted add-ons will end most likely this November, when the revamped Developer Tools will be rolled out.
“It’s been almost a year, and after reviewing the results of the program, we have decided to end it. We haven’t seen the kind of adoption we were looking for and still find that many of the best add-ons that aren’t hosted on AMO did not participate. Instead, add-ons that were already listed on AMO switched to self-hosted to avoid complying with certain review policies,” explained the Mozilla Add-ons team.
- The ability to share add-ons and collections via email has been pulled as well.
- Registered users will no longer be able to tag add-ons; only developers will be able to tag their add-ons.
And the third thing that’s been keeping Mozilla busy is the Army of Awesome. This is a new community care program meant to provide answers to those who tweet their Firefox questions.
Mozilla Community Builder William Reynolds explains: “Anyone with a Twitter account can join the Army of Awesome and reply to a tweet about Firefox. Many times it’s as simple as showing someone where to find the info they need. Just as we routinely rely on signposts to navigate streets, we’ve created some standard signpost messages so you can direct users to commonly searched pages.”
Reynolds went on to say that “Mozilla community members are known for being helpful and that spirit has been a key to Firefox’s success.”
Here are three things that have been keeping my favorite browser developer occupied recently. First up, Mozilla has a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). It took about 6 months of searching, but finally a successor for John Lilly has finally been found – his name is Gary Kovacs and he will be officially starting work on the 8th of November. Before joining the Mozilla team he was a General Manager and VP of Mobile and Devices with Adobe, and before that he spent 10 years working with IBM.