One of the new interesting features in Firefox 3 is the revamped add-ons manager that now recommends add-ons that are compatible to a user's Firefox version.
It would be interesting to see how many Firefox 2 users are actually running the browser without any add-ons installed and how this will change with the release of Firefox 3.
By default five recommended add-ons are shown when you perform a search on the about:addons page which is equivalent to the number of recommended add-ons on the Firefox homepage.
Five is not exactly a huge number of add-ons and it is nice to read that this number can be changed in the Firefox options.
Update: Mozilla seems to have increased the value to nine add-ons in recent versions of Firefox. The preference mentioned above on the other hand has a default value of 15, but any value above 9 seems to be ignored by Firefox.
I do not think that this feature is required by power users though who know where to get their share of add-ons. Casual users on the other hand may like the new add-on manager and use it to download the recommended add-ons, especially since it is built-in to the browser and does not require that you open the official Mozilla Add-ons repository or a third-party site to find out about new add-ons for the browser.
To change the number of recommended add-ons in Firefox 3 do the following:
Yes eight seems to be the maximum for now. You need to restart the web browser after you change the value. Note that any value above 9 has no effect. It is not clear why the default value is set to 15 despite that.
AdvertisementPlease click on the following link to open the newsletter signup page: Ghacks Newsletter Sign up
Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
Leave a Reply