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Part of the reason is that most users of some popular addons don't participate in the open source community, reporting bugs, commenting on them to add details o

• pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Do Mozilla contact the creators of the most popular addons, they could serve as a useful proxy for trying to get direct input from inexperienced users.
  • DiThi 9y ago
    They probably do. But Firefox addons is a long tail. There are many addons that would qualify as "popular" but Mozilla wouldn't be able to contact them all. So they have to measure not only popularity, but also if the community cares about that addon. I had many addons installed that I don't use, synchronized across devices: They may count as "popular" but it doesn't reflect the actual community and usage.
• detaro 9y ago
  And if they do, they don't communicate in the way Mozilla would like them to. Users can't say much more than "I want X to be possible", add-on developers can comment on what API they'd like, but after a short initial wave of that these things tend to be treated as noise even if they are presented very friendly, because the actual dev-work that is necessary in the end is guided by other principles these parties can't contribute much to. And it's really difficult to guide that in a way that doesn't make people feel bad.