Firefox Friday Five!

Filed under: Features, Mozilla, Browsers

I just glanced at the world weather forecast and it seems, somehow, that it is sunny EVERYWHERE. Unless you're reading this in India or China, in which case the sun has already set -- but that's beyond the point! It looks like summer is finally here (unless you're in Australia, but it never gets cold there, so who cares) -- and with the balmy heat, a slew of new releases have been ejected from Mozilla and its multitudinous offshoots this week.

So let's get stuck in, chaps. Tasty stuff lies ahead.

1. What the world needs now is extensions, sweet extensions

At least according to Daniel Buchner of Mozilla Labs, anyway! Extensions -- add-ons, plug-ins -- remain the weapon of the elite. Does your mother use add-ons? Does she even know what an extension is?

The only real barrier to add-on adoption is knowledge of their existence. If your grandfather knew of an add-on that gave him up-to-date weather reports for his favourite fishing lake, do you think he would use it? Of course!

In the Labs post, Buchner tackles the problem of extension visibility on the Web. and how to get them into the needy hands of end-users. The proposed solution is simple: an HTML link tag. Much in the same way CSS and JS files are linked to websites, you could link an extension. It's very simple for the browser to then offer a link to the extension -- grab the test implementation Jetpack extension and give it a go!

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Firefox Friday Five! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 14 May 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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