Mozilla is retiring the Add-on Collector, the Firefox extension that let you build and manage add-on collections from inside the browser. The announcement came on Mozilla’s add-ons blog on March 7, 2012. The collections feature on the Firefox Add-ons site stays. Only the companion add-on is going away.
What collections and the Add-on Collector are
Mozilla added collections to the official Firefox Add-ons site in 2009. A collection is a public list of add-ons put together by a user, usually somewhere between 5 and 30 of them, so others can find and install a useful set in one place. Mozilla made a few itself, for groups such as web developers and travelers, and some user collections became popular too.
The Add-on Collector extension brought collections into Firefox. You could create collections, add add-ons to them and follow other people’s lists without leaving the browser. Some people also used it to back up their list of add-ons, so they could reinstall them on a new PC. It did not install a whole collection in one go, though. For that, people relied on a separate third-party add-on.
Why Mozilla is retiring the Add-on Collector
Mozilla gave three reasons:
- Few users. Mozilla called it a hard decision, as the add-on is popular with some active users. But only a few hundred people had actually used it in the past few months.
- Triple the work. Mozilla has new features planned for collections. Supporting the Collector would mean building each one three times: on the site, in the APIs and in the add-on. That would make each feature take almost three times as long.
- Old APIs. The Collector relies on the Bandwagon API, which lives on the old version of the add-ons site that is being retired. Keeping the add-on alive would mean rewriting all those APIs in a new language.
What happens to your collections
Nothing is lost. Most of the add-on’s features, and many more, are already available on the add-ons website. If you have the Collector installed, Mozilla says a button will appear in the Add-ons Manager that takes you to your collections on the site. There you can keep creating and managing them. Don’t confuse the two: Mozilla is retiring the add-on, not the collections feature, which it plans to improve.
If you used it to back up add-ons
For people who used the Collector to back up their add-ons, Mozilla pointed to Add-on Sync, which is coming to Firefox. Until then, the simplest backup is a collection on the add-ons site with everything you use, so a fresh install takes a few clicks. Before adding anything back, check that it is still maintained. Mozilla regularly blocks add-ons that cause problems.
Collection owners still have to keep their lists current: removing add-ons that are no longer updated or have been pulled from the site, and adding new ones. Keeping Firefox up to date helps as well. Point releases such as Firefox 10.0.2 also fix add-on compatibility problems.
