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Mozilla brings Twitter, RSS, other messages to Firefox with Snowl
The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.
But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.
Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsStephenAAug 7th 2008 10:44AM
What Firefox could really use is something like Opera has in its most recent version.
There's a small tools icon before the first tab. Clicking on it makes a mini-sidebar with little icons for useful features.
The current system where addons put their toolbar icons on a toolbar or the statusbar or anywhere else they like is really cluttering the place.
Also my menus are bulging with options I never use put there by add-ons.
Basically what I'm saying is that if the browser is going to be used for more and more things, they need to think of ways of hiding or organizing options to keep them out of the way until you need them. I've watched Opera get better and better at this while my Firefox gets more and more complicated.
robotrockAug 7th 2008 10:48AM
isn't this exactly what AOL was? A browser with a bunch of built in communication tools?
Joao AlmeidaAug 7th 2008 11:34AM
Firefox is growing into Flock?...
JoshAug 7th 2008 12:31PM
damn it, exactly my thought.
IampriteshdesaiAug 7th 2008 1:03PM
Firefox (Mozilla) doestnt want Flock to out nudge it in the race. Flock has been getting many positive reviews all because of their browser integretion.
@StephenA
there is an extention called menu editor or some thing like that which allows you to select right click options
StephenAAug 8th 2008 9:28AM
@Iampriteshdesai
I'm aware of it and have used it in the past.
I'd just prefer Firefox to handle extensions more intelligently in the first place. Preventing or discouraging add-ons from scattering options everywhere and just being more intelligent in keeping options out of the way until they are needed.
yhancikAug 7th 2008 5:03PM
It would make wayyy more sense to me to have Snowl in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.
TB is already the place where I get my "messages" : mail, rss feeds & calendar reminders through Lightning. Not to mention that it already has that "Outlook-style 3-pane view".
Shariq AnsariAug 8th 2008 9:36PM
I have to agree with this. I use TB as my main RSS reader and it's annoying that none of the social networking/sharing tools are available or built-into what is essentially a big old messaging application.