Firefox developers shrink desktop apps

ONE OF THE DRIVING forces behind the development of FireFox is shorely the developer crowd and its never-ending ability to write new add-ons for the browser contender.

Jason Bartholme, a Coldfusion developer and blogger has compiled a neat list of his 11 favourite Firefox add-ons, with a bit of something for everyone – from graph generators to FTP clients, feed readers, blogging tools… heck, even an IRC client. Our personal fave is Pic Lens which allows you to fly by collections of images siphoned from sites, based on a simple text search. But there are plenty of others for you.

It’s a fact of life: add-ons have evolved from simple tools into full-blown apps with the added advantage of being integrated into the browser – making them OS independent, much to the chagrin of La Vole which is seeing more and more its faithful seeking a new foxy deity. So, no matter if you’re using Linux, Mac OS X or (heaven forbid) Vista – you can always plug the add-on into Firefox and give it a spin.

Now spin this the way of the UMPC. Firefox is the browser of choice for most of these little performers and these add-ons simply deliver a lot more oomph with a much smaller footprint – especially if you’re looking at saving space. Taking that to an extreme, we might be looking down the line at a Firefox office run directly from the browser, something like Gh.os.t or Glide that replaces the host of pre-installed apps that ship out with UMPCs entirely.

It would also give users a bit more control over what they have (or haven’t) installed on their smallish SSD drives. With everyone jumping on the UMPC bandwagon, there are plenty of places for the the ferret to go. µ

L’Inq
Jason Bartholme’s blog