Popularity of Firefox extensions

One of the many nice things about the Firefox Add-on store is that it allows browsing the add-ons in order of popularity, expressed as the number of users who, I suppose, use the add-ons.

When we look at the most popular extensions we notice that, unsurprisingly, that it looks like a power law, with a handful of extremely popular extensions and a long tail of interesting but as yet unpopular ones.

Popularity of the most popular Firefox extensions, as of May 2018.

The six most popular extensions are Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin, Video DownloadHelper, Easy Screenshot, Cisco WebEx and Ghostery:

• Adblock Plus (12.1 million users) and uBlock Origin (4.9 million users) are worthy ad-blockers. That Adblock Plus has more than two times the number of users of uBlock Origin is a compelling testimony as to the importance of coming first. Or possibly it may be that the purely functional user interface of uBlock Origin is deterring some users.
• Then comes Video DownloadHelper, a utility to extract, convert and save videos from web sites, including the mighty YouTube. 3.3 million users find it useful.
• In the fourth place is Easy Screenshot, a tool to get a screenshot of the entire web page. Two and a half million users have it. Why they have it is a mystery, since the functionality to get a screenshot of the entire web page is built into Firefox.
• Cisco WebEx sits on the fifth place, with 1.6 million users. It is highly likley that those are people who work for corporations which use Cisco WebEx for their virtual meeting needs.
• The admirably duplicitous Ghostery is sixth, with 1.1 million users. "Ghostery blocks marketing companies from gathering website user information, but it makes money from selling page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics to corporations globally, including corporations that are actively engaged in collecting user information to target ads and other marketing messages to consumers", says Wikipedia.