Get Internet Explorer 8’s New Features in Firefox Today
Now that IE 8 is available as a public beta, with new features and and much improved web standards support, a number of commentators are wondering what, if anything, that means for Mozilla’s Firefox.
While competition is never a bad thing and some of the new features in IE 8 are pretty handy, we don’t think Firefox has any reason to fret — Firefox add-on developers are already swooping in to duplicate IE 8’s new features before Microsoft can even get its browser out the door.
One of the new features slated for the final release of IE 8 is the Activities menu, a right click menu of frequently performed tasks — submit a page to Digg, e-mail it to a friend, etc.
Thanks to the add-on framework for Firefox, Michael Kaply, developer of the Operator add-on, has already prototyped an add-on that duplicates the IE 8 Activities menu in Firefox. In fact, it uses the same services (which, right now, aren’t all that extensive, but hopefully that will change soon).
The add-on isn’t without some quirks (it wouldn’t work on OS X for me, though Linux handled it just fine), but it worked more or less as advertised.
And bear in mind that this is the result of just one afternoon of tinkering by one person, which is why Mozilla and the Firefox community probably aren’t too worried about IE 8 — the collective community makes for a massive development resource. And that, combined with Firefox’s highly extendable add-on framework, means any catching up can be done in a matter of hours rather than years.
Update: As James notes in the comments below, Kaply has released an update to Microsoft Activities for Firefox with a bunch of bug fixes and other improvements (this also solves the OS X issues with FF3).
[via John Lilly]
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