My Spurs rant wasn’t meant for planet — put the wrong category on that by accident last night, so sorry about that.

I wrote it after the game from a craptastic bar in SJC as I waited for my plane — it was delayed 3 hours because of weather in Chicago.

I did work on a diagram for upgrading the graph server architecture last night, so I’ll offer that as a nugget of truce to planet.mozilla.org readers:

Goal is to make the graph server snappier. Comments welcome.

In a recent bug fligtar was nice enough to run some stats for me on platform strings passed in extensions.update.url via the %APP_OS% client variable in Firefox. He found some interesting results:

WINNT
Darwin
Linux
linux-gnu
SunOS
FreeBSD
linux
winnt
darwin
OS2
OpenBSD
NetBSD
BeOS
DragonFly
IRIX64
AIX
HP-UX
NTO
solaris2.10
OSF1
penis

Fixing bug 407211 will be a long and hard process, but I think I’ll be able to handle it.

So I didn’t sleep that well after reading some of the 3.2 feedback. Even they admit — some of these posts are just ridiculous but in many cases they make a lot of sense. We hear you.

Since the release of AMO 3.2, our team has been working hard to gather up all the feedback to make sure our next dot release will fix major pain points introduced by the reskin.

Jumping through the post-release blog posts, I did realize that most of the posts about AMO 3.2 were positive, and I relate to many in the community who either feel they weren’t heard or we were trying to shamelessly plug our own work. Not the case, but I understand the concern.

Truth is, 3.2 was just too big. This should have been AMO 4.0, and it overwhelmed a lot of people. We will be working on scaling back the amount of drastic changes we put out in our next dot releases. Also, to remind everyone, here are some places to track changes or plans for future releases so they aren’t surprises:

• The 3.2 milestone was was in bugzilla for some time
• We had a public preview of 3.2 up for almost a month and a half — we will do the same public preview for future dot releases
• We publish all our meetings notes verbatim so if all else fails you can see what we talk about each week in the wiki
• We are in IRC (#amo at irc.mozilla.org) if you’d like to chat
• The code is open and can be found here

From a UI perspective, not much energy has been spent discussing exactly what we were trying to do, so I’ll try to explain. A primary goal was to make the site simpler for new users. Problem was that we sacrificed some functionality in key spots in order to achieve that simplicity — and this caused some veteran AMO users some headaches. We’re rolling most if not all of these changes back in 3.4.

This brings us to the root of our UI problem — there is an identiy crisis with AMO. The site is many things to many people:

• A place where new users try to find add-ons to improve their browsing experience
• A hub for advanced users to pick up on the lateast and greatest add-ons
• An incubator for new features
• A place where developrs can get feedback and statistics for their add-on
• A tool we use to help QA popular extensions and ensure they meet quality and security guidelines

Trick is, and will continue to be, meshing these different identities together effectively without overcomplicating or oversimplifying the site. In our latest attempt, we oversimplified it and it was a mistake. Our next dot release, which will come out before Firefox 3, will sway things back the other way and address many of the concerns brought up by long-time AMO users.

Looking forward, many of our issues are cosmetic and fixable by updating our views. The backend and scalability work done in 3.2 is still there, and despite the obvious imbalance in the UI, our feet rest on a more stable platform.

So lastly — just a quiet and humble thank you to everyone who commented on our blogs, the forums or the wiki — we look forward to honoring your feedback with changes in 3.4 as we ramp up for the biggest Firefox release ever.