Mozilla Moves
Mozilla Moves Sharing from Web Pages to BrowserBy Leslie Meredith, TechNewsDaily Senior Writer
Mozilla Labs this week launched F1, a social plug-in for Firefox to quickly share any webpage link along with a personal comment from the user. For now you can share to Facebook, Twitter and Gmail contacts, but creators Mozilla Messaging say they will add more options in the next round of development.
After a quick install, the F1 icon is displayed in the upper right hand corner of the browser window. Click and a dialogue box appears with options to share to Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Once you've allowed access to your accounts, it's a simple matter to choose your channel, add a note and post.
Twitter users will appreciate F1's automatic URL shortener using bit.ly. Facebook users will like the fact they can add a comment along with the expected screenshot and brief description.
The Gmail integration is especially slick. When you choose to email a contact, the auto complete function that's part of Gmail's "compose new message" is also part of F1. Start typing a contact name and the address is automatically inserted based on your Gmail address book.
Yahoo was supposed to be included in the options, but Yahoo's mandatory CAPTCHA got in the way, according to F1 developers. "If this extra step were avoidable we would consider adding Yahoo back into the list of supported services," Bryan Clark, Mozilla Labs developer, wrote in a blog post.
At the end of the day, it's Mozilla's attempt to make sharing a browser feature rather than a web page feature, and start to clear off all those sharing button arrays that lead to "web pages that are cluttered, ugly, but also not very usable."
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