A year ago I wrote my first and only Firefox Extension Add-on (they’re called “Add-ons” as of Firefox v2.0) and it has now been downloaded 27,363 times, recently averaging about 250 downloads a week.

Who Is This Person is a simple right-menu option that appears when you highlighted a name in a Firefox browser window. You can then search for that name against 11 people-oriented web directories, from LinkedIn to Wikipedia, to IMDB to MySpace.

It’s really not very useful at all except for the moment you see someones name and what to know who they are. Not surpisingly it’s a big hit with the networking types.

Here’s an email that came in today:

Hi Ted,

I am a Technical Sourcer and I constantly use WhoisthisPerson…firefox extension…written by you.

That always makes me smile.

One thing the amazing Firefox volunteer development community has to work out is their requirement that all plug-ins add-ons can only be approved for the current version of Firefox. Right now mine is approved for version 2.0, but when 2.1 comes out, anyone that upgrades will be told my add-on is incompatible. At that point I’ll start getting emails and complaints on the download page, that this needs to be fixed immediately. My extension is so simple it would ahve worked on Firefox 0.1 and I am sure will always work in Firefox. Nonetheless, I’ll have to recompile my extension add-on with sbarely updated registry files, resubmit for approval, and then a volunteer will then approve it after a week (unless they want to refuse it because they’d prefer I used some slightly different style of error message). The last part has happened and I then I need to figure out what they mean, pretend I’m now a level-20 mozilla engineer and do it the new way. Then I resubmit and wait another week.

If you use Firefox plug-ins add-ons and wonder why your favorite extension is not compatible, it’s probably because the coder has too much going on to jump code thru hoops that would work just fine. The reality is that the protectors of the code would prefer your browser always work and review all code they get and never let any code be live longer than it’s approved expiration date. It’s a fair and safe policy, but at some point I’m going to go Borneo and stop updating it, even though the internet will break before my little widget add-on does.