Mozilla Add-Ons Sort Broken?

The Mozilla website hosts - among other programs and files - the web browser Firefox and the email client Thunderbird.

The very same website also functions as a directory for Firefox and Thunderbird add-ons which you can browse and download right from the website.

Add-ons can be sorted in various ways including by popularity, date, name or user rating.

If you visit the Firefox add-ons start page for example you notice that you can browse add-ons based on these parameters.

One would expect that the add-ons that are displayed reflect the choice made by the user. Selecting "just added" for example should display the latest Firefox add-ons in descending order so that the newest add-ons appear on top.

If you do that you will however notice that this is not the case.

If you do that right now you find an add-on from November 14 followed by November 24, October 10 and November 24 at the top of the list. The same is true for Thunderbird add-ons.

My thought was that they may be using an internal value for the order and not the date (which would be the logic thing to do) to sort and display the results. This could be the upload date for instance, which may differ from the date an add-on was reviewed.

But then I switched to the alpha-numerical sort order. Number four on the list, after three add-ons with # at the beginning, is the Get File Size add-on. This add-on is followed by add-ons that use special characters until Veja which is followed by more special characters.

The only two sort orders that seem to be working fine are downloads and ratings. The sort is broken for me on the Mozilla website.

Update: Mozilla has sorted the issue out. Regardless of which sort option you use on the Add-ons website, you always get the correct results listing now. This means results are sorted appropriately on the site now.

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