We live in an online world where everything is suppose to be free (thanks for that Mr. Anderson) regardless of the number of hours someone has  put into what they are making available via the web. Whether it be something as simple as a blog post or as involved as writing a plugin for Firefox everyone wants it for free.

There is no denying that Firefox would be as popular today without the incredibly rich add-on developer community that has made the browser the potential Internet Explorer killer it is. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen people write about how important the Firefox add-ons are. So much so that there has been an on-going discussion among developers about how they can monetize their work, because trust me there is a lot of time and effort that goes into creating and maintaining these add-ons.

Well Mozilla obviously has been listening to these conversations and as a result have introduced a pilot program to make a little spare change for their efforts. At this point the pilot program is only including a selected number of developers but if it proves successful they will open it up to all. For those that are involved in the program you will see the following when you go to the add-on’s page

But here’s the thing – not everyone is willing to pay anything for even the most popular add-ons if the poll being run by cnet is any indication. In fact right now more that 50% of the people who have responded to the poll say that they would never pay for a browser add-on.

As someone who has spent over a hundred dollars in the last couple of weeks for something as simple as themes; which it ends up I won’t be using for various reasons, the idea that people aren’t even willing to chip in something like $5 for a Firefox add-on they just can’t live without says only one thing – you’re a bunch of cheap pricks.

No related posts.

Richardson’s holiday weekend blog goes through her top 20 RC1-ready add-ons, including Adblock Plus — perhaps the best add-on you’ll ever download — along with Download Statusbar , Faviconize Tab, and Mouse Gestures.

She also profiles a few obvious favorites for the blogging crowd, like Shareaholic — intregrating Digg, del.icio.us, and Twitter into your browser — and TwitterFox, which creates a special, easy-to-access interface just for Twittering.

You can check out Deb’s entire list here.

Related posts:

1. Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.0.6
2. Firefox 3.0.1 Released
3. Mozilla Changing Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5