Unified extension menu: hide addons from menu.

[axy_david]

I think my main annoyance with the new unified extension menu is that I can't hide certain add-ons, I still want them to work and do their thing, but I don't necessarily want to see them in the extension menu.

This is affecting us the people who like to use more than 2-3 add-ons in our browser. For example the decentraleyes addon is doing a great work in the background however I don't really need to interact with it so I would like to hide it from the addon bar.

In the previous overflow menu we could just drag them out from the menu when in customization mode.
It would be nice to be able to do that in the new extension menu as well or at least hide them.

[Jon]

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[Shadrak]

yeah that's was litteraly perfect before that, i don't understand why they regressed?

I can understand the unified extension by default for beginner and easiness, but why remove one of the best thing of firefox which is the customization of ALL the toolbar, addons/extensions included, I miss it so much, please get it back 🙏

[Yukulélé]

Even the deactivated extensions appear.
And it's not possible to reorder by drag and drop.

[Dontwantone]

Fully support this idea. I have a bunch of add-ins whose functionality does not require a toolbar button so this change just adds clutter.

[adamkimber]

This! Fully support this idea. I don't think the menu is going away but at least a way to customise it would be great, particularly with hiding add-ons / extensions that I do not want to interact with daily.

[Cleridwen]

Hi,

Here is my addition to this thread, partially because of personal frustrations with the new unified extension menu.

As a Firefox Beta user, I've had plenty of time to get familiarized with the way extensions are now organized. Despite that, it has been for me both less useful and slower to use than what was available before. I have 50 to 60 add-ons installed currently, and the menu makes it very tedious to go through them. Not only the list is larger and less compact, adding a lot of visual clutter with the subtitles about which extension can or cannot modify the current page, it also seems to make no sense when it comes to sorting; extensions aren't sorted alphabetically at all, which makes it a serious chore to find the extension I need to interact with at a given moment.

It could somewhat be easily dealt with, if it was possible to drag extensions out of this menu and back into the overflow menu, but alas this is not the case.

But I am not here only to complain. In my time using the new menu for multiple hours every day, I have taken a close look at what seemed to be the biggest issues with it, and compiled a list of suggestions that could potentially improve the current extension menu:

• Make extensions more organized. Displaying first the extensions that can be interacted with, organized in alphabetical order, and then the extensions that cannot be interacted with, also by alphabetical order, would go a long way in helping users find what they want faster. Alternatively, offering different sorting options, or even the option to manually drag and drop extensions wherever the user sees fit on the list, for example from the "Customize Firefox" view, would be very welcome.
• Allow us to show or hide extensions. Not every user needs constant access to every extension they have installed; maybe they want a list with only a few of them that they interact with frequently, and keep those that rarely needs tweaking, hidden away. Allowing us to put extensions back in the toolbar's overflow menu would be a perfect fit. Alternatively, letting us hide extensions entirely from the unified extension menu could serve a similar purpose.
• Make the subtitle less prominent. Being able to know whether an extension is currently able to access information for a specific page, all websites, or nothing at all, is a useful privacy feature. However, in its current form, the added line of text for every single extension makes for a very visually cluttered interface, further degrading the user's ability to quickly find what they need, compared to the old way, with extensions in the Overflow menu. Having those subtitles changed to an icon, or maybe have the line with the extension's name expand when hovered or selected to reveal the subtitle, would likely help a lot with visual clutter; although, this would require some testing, to figure out which method conveys the extension's intent the best, and is compatible with all input methods (mouse cursor, keyboard, and touch input).
• Bonus suggestion: Make it possible to open the Extension menu as a sidebar. Allowing the menu to be displayed as a static sidebar (just like the Bookmarks and History sidebars), would let users easily navigate back and forth between an extension's panel and the extension list, leaving the whole panel visible whenever necessary, rather than having an extension's panel always close if the user clicks anywhere outside it to interact with something else, making it frustrating to open the extension menu again, find the correct extension, and get back to what you were doing.

I believe there is a good amount of work needed to improve the add-ons experience within Firefox (for example, having a dedicated button under "about:addons", when viewing a specific add-on, to access its options, rather than hiding such an important action under the three-dot meatball menu), and I am glad to see that some attention is being put into the issue with this new menu. I hope that this feedback can help the Mozilla team focus future efforts into making the new extension menu at least as convenient to use as the feature it replaced (manually organizing extensions in the toolbar overflow menu), and potentially into an inspiration in terms of functional design.

Cleridwen

[willdurand]

Hi, this bug on Bugzilla is the closest one I could find related to this idea: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1800883, which means we are aware that some extensions will never be very useful in the extensions panel, despite our initial thinking (which was to show all enabled extensions to raise awareness).

In terms of customization, Firefox 113 allows the extensions button to be moved on the navbar and Firefox 114 allows to reorder (most) extensions in the extensions panel.

[VCSMaster]

I don't want to be able to move it around, I don't care where it is on the toolbar - I don't want it on the toolbar at all. Every update I install, I regret instantly. I'm either going to roll back to 110 and stay there until the button can be removed again (It was at least removable in that version) or I'm going to switch to another browser.

I use Firefox as my primary browser on several machines - Some of which are remote managed. Can you imagine how adding extra, unmovable garbage to the UI might hinder the use of your software on small screens during remote access, or on small portable machines like the GPD Pocket 3?

[Skape]

Forced UI changes are a sign of bad design.