The Mike Abundo Effect

Kicking IE7’s teeth even further down its throat, the Mozilla Foundation now seeks to incorporate social networking into Firefox. Enter The Coop:

Overview
The Coop is a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.

Users will see their friends’ faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person’s recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend’s face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend’s face glows to get the user’s attention.

Motivation
Perhaps the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link. It’s done over IM, email, weblogs, RSS feeds from aggregator sites, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and even over the phone. The desire is the same: “hey, friend, go check out this neat thing and then let’s talk about it!”

The goal of The Coop is to ease this interaction, and merge it with similar tools provided by a large number of popular web services.

Right now, I hate both MySpace and Friendster. The former is a walled garden; the latter is a glacier. I would much prefer an open, noncommercial social network seamlessly integrated into both my browsing experience and my friends’ Web services. The Coop sounds like just the ticket. Existing end-user Web services would do well to make sure they can show up in The Coop, at the very least with per-user RSS feeds.

Everything sounds cooler when you name it like a game. Firefox 3: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is out. The final version of Firefox 3 isn’t due until Fall 2007, so this is a really early sneak peek.

And to think Firefox 2 came out less than two months ago, enhanced security and all. That’s open source dev for you. By contrast, over five years passed between Internet Explorer 6 and 7 — and it still sucks. Bill Gates will retire before Microsoft gets IE right.

I’ve been enjoying its test and final versions for a while now, so I’m glad it’s out in time to kick IE7’s shiny blue ass. On top of all the cool features of its predecessor, Firefox 2 sports these new features:

• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.

• Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled.

• Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.

• Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.

• Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.

• Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds: Users can decide how to handle Web feeds (like this one), either subscribing to them via a Web service or in a standalone RSS reader, or adding them as Live Bookmarks. My Yahoo!, Bloglines and Google Reader come pre-loaded as Web service options, but users can add any Web service that handles RSS feeds.

• Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a separate application.

• Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a “Live Title”. Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.

• Improved Add-ons manager: The new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.

• JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.

• Extended search plugin format: The Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.

• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.

• Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.

• SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.

• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.

I’ve been a Firefox fan since day one — and I worked with a Microsoft partner at the time! This blog now supports Firefox 2 Live Titles. If you’re not using Firefox, you’re missing out on half the Web experience — three-fourths if you count the add-ons. You have no excuse to, either: it’s all free.