14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Labs is debuting Firefox Share Alpha, a new Firefox add-on designed to make it easy to share to any of your favorite sites from the browser, no buttons needed and with just a couple of clicks.
For now, the add-on supports Twitter, Facebook and Gmail, but as the name clearly suggests, this is just the initial alpha version.
If you're a Firefox fan and have been following what Mozilla Labs has been up to, you may remember that it was already working on a Firefox add-on for online sharing.
That add-on was dubbed F1 and the new, and much better named, Firefox Share is a descendant of that project.
However, while the idea is the same, the add-on has been completely rewritten, which is why you may find that some features and supported services are missing.
"We’re pleased to introduce the Firefox Share alpha add-on, a spinoff from the F1 add-on you may already be using. Firefox Share is a descendant of F1, but it differs in a few significant ways," Mozilla Labs' Shane Caraveo wrote.
"We’re developing Firefox Share as an add-on so it can evolve in parallel with the rest of Firefox. Firefox Share works with all current Firefox versions," he said.
The first thing you'll notice is that the add-on looks different from F1. In fact, it looks different depending on the OS you're using, the team wanted to feel part of Firefox so it adapted the look and feel for each platform.
Mozilla also noted that the new add-on does not rely on Mozilla servers at all, as F1, did, making it easier to scale. Mozilla is also promising to support more services in time, in fact, it wants as many services as possible, not just the top five or top 10 popular ones.
Firefox Share will continue to evolve, this is just the first iteration, the next step is to add support for more services and to generally improve the add-on.