Dear Firefox: Clickable Recommended Plugins

Dear Firefox,

After reading this article (TheHackerNews.com) about over a dozen Firefox and Google Chrome plugins that have been sending data about their users, I decided to make sure I didn’t have any of these plugins installed on my browser.

At the bottom of the plugins page, your browser had recommended a few plugins to me. I didn’t want to add them right away, so I thought I’d click on each plugin to see what the reviews said and to learn more without adding them to my browser.

But I can’t click on them.

What kind of campaign is this, to only give me the option to install these plugins first before being able to learn more about them?

I can’t click the title or the icon. But I can click the author? Sure, that means instead of one step, I might have to take 2 to 4 steps to find the intended plugin page. But seriously? In this era of UI design, no one chimed up and said “Hey, why don’t we make the titles and icons linked to the plugins?” Did that person get run over by a train that day? Because corralling users to add plugins without verifying them is another cherry on top of your recent scandal.