Japan/AMJ

Status

As of Jan 2016, the server no longer is maintained in Mozilla Japan and this site no longer works.

We at Mozilla Japan have our own Firefox add-ons library (AMJ) instead of Firefox Add-ons (AMO). Here is some background information on the AMJ service.

Although AMO's interface is fully localizable, we have some problems:

AMO has no capability to search/browse add-ons by locale. (Bug 285850)
AMO has no capability to find authors by locale.
Some add-ons are localized with machine translation. Those qualities are bad for Japanese.
Some add-ons are partially localized. It's impossible to pick up really localized add-ons mechanically.
~~AMO's search engine doesn't support multibyte queries.~~ - partially fixed?
Most of localized add-ons don't have their localized summary and description on AMO.
- Therefore, we cannot search these add-ons by Japanese even if they're localized.
- Example: search タブ (tab) on AMO (only 13 results) vs AMJ (110 results)
Most of the recommended add-ons are not localized.
- The requirements should have l10n for the Tier 1 and 2 locales.

The bottom line is, it's very difficult for us to find add-ons which can be used in our language.

We've filed bugs aiming to globalize AMO. See Bug 635826 for details.

To resolve these issues, we've started the AMJ project as an AMO proxy.

AMJ allows Japanese Firefox users to search/browse extensions which are developed by Japanese companies/individuals or (almost) completely localized.
- As of February 2012, more than 950 extensions are listed.
- The list has been maintained manually since October 2006.
- Since January 2011, we have been adding the Preliminarily Reviewed add-ons.
AMJ combines AMO's data with our own data:
- The add-on meta data is imported through AMO's public API (description, screenshot, icon, etc.)
- AMJ showcases extensions with completely localized summaries and numbers of weekly downloads. Those numbers are counted on the AMJ server and indicate which extensions are popular for Japanese users.
- AMJ also shows numbers of tweets/bookmarks which are retrieved from Twitter and some social bookmark services.
AMJ has own 20 categories. (Unfortunately AMO's categories are useless... Those are arbitrarily assigned by the add-on authors, not by the editors. Also, types of categories are not enough for every add-on.)
AMJ has own featured extension list.
AMJ is fully integrated into Japanese Firefox builds (ja and ja-JP-mac locales), and the users can search/browse through the Add-ons Manager interface. (Bug 427323)
- Currently the integration has been broken due to the changes on AMO. See Bug 505077 for details.

We are working on upgrading the AMJ service.