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Extensions and Plugins

Published by marco on

PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera (Slashdot) is a discussion about Firefox, for the most part. Several times during the discussion, people praise the Extension Manager in Firefox.

It’s not enough.

To really take off, this Extension Manager is an excellent base. However, if you visit the site and see the jungle of plugins that await you, you’re a fool if you think “most” people are willing to wade through it to configure their browser. Programmers and geeks love it. “Most” people will not.

Here’s the thing. I think that the plugins are a great idea. It’s wonderful that the community can finally get going and create a hotbed of research for browsing tools. This is the kind of place where new ideas for browsing are born.

I just don’t want to play.

Ordinarily, I would. A few years ago, I would have been one of the first there, downloading every last stupid plugin to see which one does what without crashing — until I had a set that defined my perfect browser.

Now, I’m just too damned lazy.

No, check that. I’m too damned busy to waste massive amounts of time configuring and customizing my browser. And I think a lot of other people are the same way. They may not be too busy, but they probably won’t dare to jump into those types of configuration hassles.

No, what Firefox needs is to create standard packages of components. Some people at Opera have already been thinking along these lines, with Hugin and Munin, offering downloadable packs that magically converts your Opera into Thunderbird/Firebird lookalikes to allow people to slowly convert from another browser.

Firefox has an even bigger advantage, because their extensions allow them to add actual new functionality to the browser, whereas Opera only reconfigures existing components.

I use Opera. Show me how Firefox does everything Opera does. For free.

Then maybe I’ll convert to Firefox. But I’m not going to dig through a site full of extensions trying to find the ones that make Firefox do all the stuff Opera does.

This comment at Slashdot maintains exactly that: that Opera… functionality is available as extensions.

“Every single one of the things you listed is available as an extension for Firefox. … I like extensions because they are incredibly powerful, but avoid bloat for the average user.”

I think that, as soon as we’re talking about the average user, we can stop talking about people that will install extensions.

Imagine if the entire IE market were to start using Firefox. How many of them do you think would use extensions?

For the average user, there’s a huge advantage to having a product that was designed … instead of a product that is designed by the customer. The Firefox technology is starting to come together; just because it’s open-source doesn’t mean it can succeed without at least some consideration of product positioning and listening to market needs. What is Firefox’s target market? IE users? Opera users? Figure that out, then build pre-made browser configurations that address those markets exactly.

Comments

#1 − More Opera startup packs

marco

When you start up Opera for the first time ever, it defaults to the Startup home page at Opera. From here, you have a link to Customize, which offers one-click downloads that adjust your browser to have the “IE/Firefox look and feel” or “Safari look and feel”.

They may not be open-source, but they seem to know how to get new users accustomed to their product.

Does Firefox have anything like this?