Wow, cool! People actually read this blog. How exciting. Thanks for all the email.
There have been some misunderstandings about my last post. I'm not suggesting that any of the Mozilla add-ons are bad. On the contrary, I love them, all of them, and use many of them. Neither am I claiming that image #1 represents the Mozilla default. It clearly doesn't. There are easily 7 or 8 non-default items visible there.
My point is this: there are two basic voices that I hear in this project, when it comes to features. The first voice says, "make everything part of the default build and just give users a pref to turn it off if they don't like it." The other voice says, "make it easier for people to build add-ons and plugins and support communities and projects like mozdev for niche features or even popular features that aren't now part of the core mozilla.org release." The first voice has led to an increasingly bloated app with decreasing performance and an almost unusable preferences manager. It's my hope that Phoenix speaks with the second voice. I think it will and I'm encouraged by the potential that customizable toolbars will allow the add-on builders. I also can't wait for the add-on/plug-in manager that will be implemented in Phoenix, making install, management (selective enabling and disabling) and uninstall of plug-ins and add-ons much better. These and other Phoenix changes should make it a lot easier to for the mozdev and other developers and the miriad of wonderful extensions they're building, to flourish.
