Update on the browser extensions

In the past one of the ways of working with Delicious has been the browser extensions. For users of those extensions, it’s been frustrating that some of the features are not working.  There’s also inconsistency between the features in different browser extensions.  We want to clarify our position on the extensions and where we are going from here.

The original developers of the extensions did not anticipate Delicious users with thousands of bookmarks. As users noticed before the AVOS acquisition of Delicious, the extensions can at times transfer so much data that they cause problems with internet connections and browser stability. Rewriting the extensions to avoid these problems will take time and resources.

The challenge this creates is that our focus is on innovating and moving Delicious forward. We are rebuilding it into a site that once more attracts millions of people to enjoy the best content the web has to offer.  How the Delicious site works and operates is changing. It will continue to grow and change more quickly and this is where we are directing our efforts.

We recently reviewed the status of the extensions. Rather than keep people “hanging on” in the hope that we will work on them soon, we want to be up front about the following decisions we have reached:

1. We’re putting the extensions on ice.  We will remove some broken options to avoid having non-functioning features deployed. This point is most relevant to the Firefox extension which always had more features than the others. Beyond this we have no current plans to continue developing them.
2. We will promote the bookmarklet as the best way to interact with the site.  For the next few months this is where users will experience and see the changes we are bringing to Delicious.

If you already use a browser extension and are happy with it, then this has no impact on you.  If you want to experience the best that Delicious has to offer with the new features and changes we are launching, then we recommend that you use the bookmarklet.

We do believe extensions still have a place, but at the moment our priority is to focus resources on the experience at the front end of the site.  We’ll review the role extensions play with Delicious in several months time once the front end experience has further matured.

EDIT: Updated the link to reflect the new tools page location.