In a recent blog post, I asked those of you who are using more than 10 extensions to tell me about how you use the web. There were a number of great replies and a couple of (obvious, in hindsight) trends came out of that discussion. The kinds of users who have more than ten extensions seem to fall into three groups (with lots of overlap.) The first group is web developers. There are several great tools for web development and it's not difficult to break the 10 extension mark when you've got a handful of development tools installed. The second group includes people who want to modify or enhance traditional browser features, including extensions that alter content. Representative extensions types here included ad blocking, bookmark enhancements, and tabbed browsing features. The third vein included features that aren't traditionally thought of as browser features, add-ons like weather status displays and music player controls.
Many people who responded seemed to appreciate that their browsing habits might be very different from the habits of others and wouldn't suggest that everyone install the same set of extensions they used. Some of commenters were critical of me or of the project team for not including some or all of their favorite features by default in Firefox.
I'm interested in some more discussion around this topic. When you think about the hundreds of millions of people surfing the web today, what extensions do you think have broad enough appeal that say 90% of web users would benefit from that extension. What about extensions that would benefit 100% of users, or 50% of web users?
In that previous post, a lot of you wrote down long lists of extensions and why they suited your surfing habits. I'd be very interested to see your list of extensions again, but this time accompanied by your guess as to the percentage of web users that would benefit enough from each one of those to have it included in a Firefox distribution. (and I'm not excluding the possibility that we might end up with more than one distribution here.)
I'll start :-) Here are my guesses about the usefulness of my extensions to a general web audience.
Resizeable Textarea: about 10% of the web population would benefit.
SpellBound: maybe 50% of web users would find this useful (webmail being the most common use case. Forums and Blogs next.)
Link Visitor: Less than 1% of the web would have any use for this.
Your turn :-)
