User:Bhashem/WildOnAddons
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Overview
One of the important questions for the Mozilla and Firefox platform is:
- How many add-ons make up the Mozilla add-ons eco-system?
It's important to get the answer to this so that:
- We can understand how pervasive Mozilla add-ons are
- We can help users find ALL the add-on available on the net (not just those on AMO)
- We can use this number to show a groundswell of support for the platform to encourage others to develop to it
- We can start to index this information in a central location (AddonSearch)
This actually turns out to be quite hard to answer. AMO is one of the main distribution point for add-ons but it's certainly not the only one. The goals of this project is to gather and index information about add-ons "in the wild".
Here are a few ideas about where add-ons can be hiding.
Aggregation Sources
- Mozilla AMO (public & sandboxed)
- Mozilla AMO Update Service (some authors don't include an update URL which means that Firefox attempts to get updates from AMO and the GUID is logged)
- AMO-like sites: AMI, Sociz, China, Mozilla Japan Addons, Addons.pl, other locale-specific sites?
- Source Repos: MozDev projects, Google Code & SourceForge
- Search results: Google ("filetype:xpi", "firefox add-ons", "firefox extensions"), Yahoo, etc...
- Those mentioned in Google Alerts (blogs & news) on a regular basis
- Addon-specific sites for XUL Apps (Songbird Nest, Flock Extensions, ...)
Individual Sources
- Corporations (Google Toolbar, Google Labs)
- Inside of Installers (Symantec Anti-Virus, McAfee, Skype, Java)
- Individual authors' blogs and websites
Project Definition
- Write a crawler that gathers info from some of the sources named above
- Index the collected info and try to extract metadata from page context and the install.{js/rdf}
- Allow "manual entries" to be entered into the index (e.g. for add-ons bundled in Installers)
- Build a search/advanced search UI on top of the index
- Initial focus should be on Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Flock, Songbird and Nvu only
Tech Notes
- Thankfully most add-on have a .xpi file extension, so they might be easier to identify
- .xpi files are ZIP files and usually contain either an install.{js/rdf} which has info about what the add-on does
- The install.{js/rdf} contains a GUID which uniquely identifies the add-on (hopefully) - we may be able to use this as the primary index
- TargetApplication id's and versions