The recent success of the Firefox movement — thousands of volunteers
spreading the Gospel of
Mozilla to every corner of the Internet — is spawning a new kind of
growth.
Nearly 1,000 enthusiasts have spent this month celebrating the release of Firefox
1.0 at 394 launch parties around the world, from the U.S. to Pakistan,
Vietnam to Chile.
And it’s at these parties that another kind of buzz is making the rounds —
the real-world word-of-mouth propagation of popular Firefox extensions.
Extensions are add-ons to the open-source Web browser, clever little
applications created by independent developers that expand on the base
functionality provided through the development process at the Mozilla
Foundation.
For now, the effectiveness of extension promotion is largely confined to the
people who are already sold on the Firefox browser. But, according to
Stephen Downes, a Firefox user who by day is a researcher at Canada’s
National Research Council, the added features extensions should catch on
with mainstream Firefox users.
“The ease of installing these things, you click a button and they’re in, is
really nice,” he said. “Once people catch on to that, that will take off in
a big way but it probably hasn’t caught on a lot except among the early
adopters; we’re looking at one year, two years down the line before the
impact of this is really felt.”
For now, a growing number of new Firefox users are getting used to the base
features in the browser. According to Mozilla Foundation officials Monday,
browser downloads number 5.6 million in the first two weeks since its
launch.
Currently, there are 132 extensions on Mozilla’s extension page, providing a
bevy of features. They range from the nice-to-have to the got-to-have. In
the nice-to-have department, there’s extensions like Watchcow.net’s Amazon
Feed Injector — that expands on the Live Bookmarks feature in Firefox to
provide RSS feeds for Amazon product and wish list Web pages — and
WeatherFox, which displays Weather.com information in the bottom right-hand
corner of the page, configurable by zip code. In the got-to-have category,
there’s extensions like the SecurePassword Generator and SpoofStick, which
detects spoofed
For the 20 people attending the Vancouver Mozileum at Stamp’s Landing
Neighborhood Pub in Vancouver, Canada, the talk centered around a relatively
new extension, Wikalong. Unlike a traditional Wiki, which lets users add or
edit a Web page’s content under a collaborative “open editing” concept,
Wikalong is more like an accumulation of comments from previous visitors.
Users with the Wikalong extension can see previous annotations (and also add
their own ) on what they think of a particular media report or comment on
the business activities of a particular company’s Web site. Microsoft.com’s
Wikalong entry, for example, provides links to alternatives like Linux, BSD,
Java and, of course, Mozilla.
More worrisome to some is the fact users can add login and password
information to restricted sites, concerns which are legitimate. A Wikalong
annotation for the New York Times online contained login information which
no longer works. Another Firefox extension, BugMeNot, is a much more
popular, and effective, means of bypassing restricted sites. The site’s
home page boasts that 38,268 sites have been “liberated.”
Wikalong shares some similarities to another annotation service launched in
1999. Third
Voice was a Netscape and Internet Explorer (IE) plug-in that was
originally designed to let users make comments on a Web page’s content, but
morphed into an e-commerce outfit. The company faded out of existence in
2001 after groups like “Say No to Third Voice” mounted a campaign to stop
its spread over privacy, security and cyber-trespassing concerns, according
to media reports at the time.
Wikalong’s author, John Cappiello, was not available for comment at press
time.
Downes said the buzz around the extension comes from its ability to make
static Web pages interactive in a way that involves everyone. Wikalong’s
staying power, of course, resides in continued popularity, adoption and use
by the Firefox community. Knowing how well they can throw a party, lack of
enthusiasm shouldn’t be a problem.
