617360 - Allow addon search results to include incompatible extensions

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 581065

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement)

Description

[keeganwitt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101207 Firefox/4.0b8pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101207 Firefox/4.0b8pre

Searching for less-popular add-ons, such as "scriptish" yields no hits in the new addons interface, whereas the addons.mozilla.org yields hits. It should be noted that popular add-ons do appear in the new interface (such as noscript).

If the results can't be the same in both, there should be a button to run the current search in addons.mozilla.org from the new interface (I think there used to be one in the 3.6 interface).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Navigate to about:addons
2.Click "Get addons"
3.In the search dialog, search for "scriptish"
4.Click the "Available Add-ons" button
Actual Results:  
"Could not find any matching add-ons" message appears

Expected Results:  
Results from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=scriptish&cat=all should be present, including https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/231203/

Comment 1

[Srinivas]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre)
> Gecko/20101207 Firefox/4.0b8pre
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre)
> Gecko/20101207 Firefox/4.0b8pre
> 
> Searching for less-popular add-ons, such as "scriptish" yields no hits in the
> new addons interface, whereas the addons.mozilla.org yields hits. It should be
> noted that popular add-ons do appear in the new interface (such as noscript).
> 
> If the results can't be the same in both, there should be a button to run the
> current search in addons.mozilla.org from the new interface (I think there used
> to be one in the 3.6 interface).
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1.Navigate to about:addons
> 2.Click "Get addons"
> 3.In the search dialog, search for "scriptish"
> 4.Click the "Available Add-ons" button
> Actual Results:  
> "Could not find any matching add-ons" message appears
> 
> Expected Results:  
> Results from
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=scriptish&cat=all should be
> present, including https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/231203/

The add-on you are trying to search is an unreviewed add-on. Hence you are not able to get it in the Add-on manager search.

The unreviewed and incompatible addons will never be shown in the Add-on manager search

Comment 2

[keeganwitt]

Thank you for explaining. I still think it would be helpful to have a link in the add-on manager to search AMO if you don't see the addon you're searching for in the manager results.
The manager is probably the first place people would look to get addons and unless you already know about AMO from previous FF releases, it might be unclear that they should look there.

I'm thinking a message towards the bottom that says something like "Don't see what you're looking for? Search for more addons here..."

Comment 3

[Mingyi Liu]

No, this issue is not just for the unreviewed addons. It in fact affects most addons.  

To prove it, type "Adblock" or "Adblock Plus" into the addon manager, and see what you can find. Both FF4 and FF5b2 failed to find "Adblock Plus", the #1 most popular addon on AMO, yet it's nowhere to be found in the 14 results.

Adblock Plus is the 1st addon I install every time, so I found it months ago and assumed it's a bug that'd be reported and fixed really quickly. I'm amazed that the FF5 Addon Manager search still has the bug.

For my own fully reviewed addons, TableTools2 and Double Click Closes Tab, one is months old and another a month old, neither appear in Addon Manager search results even if you use exactly the same to search for them. Again, it's not just unreviewed, or just months-old extensions. Lots of extensions are missing from the Addon Manager's search results.

I hope that Addon Manager's search results can be synchronized with AMO. Seems to me it's just a simple Ajax call, why implement a different and much inferior search in Addon Manager than AMO's own search?

Comment 4

[Mingyi Liu]

Hmm, I just asked two friends to check on this, but they both were able to find Adblock Plus in their Addon Manager! Not only so, they see "TableTools2" addon in "Up and Coming" section of their "Get Addons" tab while I don't see it anywhere in both of my FF profiles. It's ironic that the author of TT2 doesn't see TT2 in either the "Up and Coming" or Addon Manager search results - I was bewildered why there's a flood of download of "Up and Coming" source for TT2, because I don't see it myself.

There must be some other bug, but I don't know where the problem lies. But it must be a FF bug because no addons I install should be able/allowed to affect Addon Manager search results.

Comment 5

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Reporter -> Are you still experiencing this issue? Have you tried searching with a new profile?

Comment 6

[keeganwitt]

I don't seem to be experiencing the same issue as previously (unreviewed addons now appear in the addon manager).  However, I did notice incompatible addons do not show up in Addon Manager results.  While I think this is desirable default behavior, I think a button like 'Show incompatible addons', or a link to AOM would be nice.  Because not all addons that aren't marked as compatible are actually incompatible.  And there will probably be a small increase of such addons now that FF has moved to the new versioning system that seems to use major release numbers more liberally.